UP CLOSE:
New Haven's push for police accountability

Written by Ashna Gupta

Photos by Neehar Gandhi

Published on April 13, 2018

Steven Winter ’11 couldn’t understand why the police were putting him in handcuffs.

“All I was trying to do was check up on my friend,” Winter told the News earlier this month.

At around 1 a.m. on Saturday, Oct. 2, 2010, New Haven Police Department officers raided Morse-Stiles Screw at the Elevate and Alchemy nightclub, tasing a member of the Yale football team and arresting five students, including Winter. The police, some of them in SWAT gear, cursed and yelled as they raided the club — using physical force and threatening to jail students if they didn’t “shut the f— up.” Winter, who was charged with disorderly conduct and trespassing, eventually saw his charges dropped after he promised not to sue the New Haven Police Department.

The police chief at the time, Frank Limon, assigned blame for the incident to former Assistant Chief Ariel Melendez, who led the raid. Limon retired before the release of an Internal Affairs report on the encounter, which determined the officers’ actions were justifiable and that they did not use unnecessary force.

But Yale students disagreed. Outrage ensued. Marches on New Haven police headquarters followed.

Compared to some others’ experiences, though, Winter’s was mild. Over the years, activists say, New Haven residents have seen their loved ones harassed, or even shot, by police officers with little or no consequences.

Now, Winter, the newly elected alder for Ward 21, is part of a cohort of activists pushing for New Haven to form an independent civilian review board — a body that would oversee policing in the city and investigate misconduct. Activists say that without an independent civilian review board, the police lack accountability, and situations like Winter’s — and others far more serious — will continue to beset the city.

Yet creating an effective civilian review board is easier said than done. The New Haven Police Union has expressed opposition to a board with any role in disciplining officers, citing language in the police union’s labor contract. The expenses associated with putting together the board have deterred the city during a period of fiscal restraint. And the question of whether the board would have subpoena power — the ability to demand documents and appearances by witnesses — has stalled efforts.

But now, with protests against police violence and calls for greater accountability sweeping the nation, this decadeslong effort has seen a resurgence, and activists are more adamant than ever that the city must institute an effective civilian review board.

A DECADESLONG PROCESS

For over 20 years, members of the New Haven community have pushed the city to establish a civilian review board, but the question remains: What would a truly effective civilian review board in New Haven entail?

The matter first arose in November 1995, when then-Ward 3 Alder Anthony Dawson proposed an ordinance to the Board of Alders for an all-civilian review board. At the time, though, few alders considered the proposal particularly pressing, and the ordinance never came to a full-board vote.

Two years later, an unarmed 21-year-old, Malik Jones, was shot at close range by an East Haven officer following a car chase in New Haven. A burst of activism on the issue followed. For years, Emma Jones, Malik’s mother, fought for justice for her son, arguing that the shooting was unwarranted. The case dragged on for a decade and a half, with appeals and petitions filed on both sides. Although Emma Jones never received compensation — the U.S. Supreme Court decided not to hear her case — a judge eventually ruled that her son’s civil rights had been violated.

Jones’ case caused civilian review board discussions to accelerate in the late 1990s and 2000s. At forums, conferences and meetings, residents called for a strong civilian review board with subpoena power — the ability to compel testimony, summon documents and demand other evidence related to an investigation. But in 2001, before the Board of Alders could propose or vote on an ordinance, then-Mayor John DeStefano issued an executive order calling for a civilian review board. The caveat? The board DeStefano outlined was not independent from the New Haven Police Department; it relied on police officers to conduct investigations on their fellow officers’ alleged misconduct. It also lacked subpoena power.

“Mayor DeStefano basically halted the whole process by passing a board of his own by executive order,” said Wally Hilke LAW ’18, who got involved in the civilian review board effort when activists recruited Yale Law School students for research.

In short, the executive order created a civilian review board that had none of the powers advocates were pushing for. Since it lacked adequate funds, the board had to rely on police staff to investigate misconduct, meaning the board could not collect information on its own. Hilke said that this board’s establishment took some of the “wind out of the sails,” because some activists thought they had succeeded in creating a New Haven civilian review board, even though the board lacked the powers it needed to be effective.

Chris Desir LAW ’18, another law student and community organizer, called DeStefano’s board a “smokescreen” that provided a layer of “apparent legitimacy.”

DeStefano acknowledged in an interview that the board he established in 2001 probably did not have enough resources or personnel to be as effective as it was intended to be.

“I don’t think what we tried to do in 2001 was necessarily conceptually inappropriate,” DeStefano said. “I just think perhaps we didn’t implement it as aggressively as we might have.”

Regardless of that board’s effectiveness, or lack thereof, all was not lost — activists had another chance to institute a board, this time with the necessary powers.

Every 10 years, the New Haven city charter — the document that lays out the rights and privileges of various Elm City institutions — goes up for review. In 2013, after much debate, a referendum was passed that mandated the creation of a more powerful review board in the city charter, dissolving DeStefano’s “smokescreen” board.

Still, five years after the referendum, with the requirement in the city charter, there is no civilian review board in New Haven, as questions about implementation continue to retard a decadeslong process.

THE RIGHT INGREDIENTS

Following the election of President Donald Trump, protests on both sides of the aisle flooded news print and television screens. In June 2017, longtime New Haven activist Barbara Fair was trying to counterprotest white nationalists on the New Haven Green. But in the process, she was arrested — unjustly, she said.

Fair said she filed a complaint for an investigation with the Internal Affairs office after the arrest. But in January 2018, she found out the case had been closed even though the office never reached out to her for additional comment following her initial statement.

Fair said the closure of her Internal Affairs case highlights one of the central shortcomings of the police department: a lack of transparency. Camille Seaberry ’08, an organizer with People Against Police Brutality, agreed, saying that transparency is a key component to an effective internal affairs office.

“You file a complaint and you don’t really know what happens,” Seaberry said. “It’s just kind of a black box.”

Fair and Seaberry believe the solution to the transparency problem is a powerful civilian review board. And many New Haveners share that view, according to Ward 7 Alder Abigail Roth ’90 LAW ’94, who said the need for a board is one of the three issues her constituents brought up most often during the campaign.

“By having the ability to actually have accountability and shine a light on those officers who are bad apples, it protects the ones who are good — who are most of them — and it helps our justice system,” Roth said.

A year ago, in a statement to the News, New Haven police chief Anthony Campbell ’95 DIV ’09, said he generally supports the implementation of a civilian review board, as it would strengthen the department’s accountability. Over the past week, Campbell did not respond to repeated requests for comment about the powers he would like to see a civilian review board possess.

Activists don’t want just any civilian review board. They want one with the power to hold the police department to account. That means having an independent investigator, unaffiliated with the police department, Winter said. And it also means giving the board subpoena power and some role in deciding appropriate disciplinary action for officers.

“In a democracy, the community should control how police departments operate, not the other way around,” said Dan Barrett, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Connecticut. “Ensuring that a civilian review board is run by and for the people requires making sure that civilian review board is independent from the police department.”

Even DeStefano — whose meager civilian review board may have set the movement back in the early 2000s — agrees that while police officers generally behave well, a review board would benefit the community.

“I don’t think you need to have a problem in order to have robust review of police behaviors,” he said. “I think it serves everybody well to have that.”

THE POWER TO SUBPOENA?

Creating an independent, effective civilian review board is not as simple as putting a few New Haven residents in a room to talk about police misconduct. Without subpoena power — the ability to gather documents and compel witnesses, especially police officers, to testify — a civilian review board would have no teeth, experts and activists say.

Although many alders, both past and present, have argued that it would be illegal for the civilian review board to have subpoena power, Hilke said that is simply misinformation that has been propagated over the years.

During the latest public hearing held on the civilian review board in April 2017, then-Ward 9 Alder and Legislation Committee Chair Jessica Holmes said that granting subpoena or discipline power to the review board is illegal under state law, which stipulates that an institution cannot acquire subpoena power unless it is conferred by the state.

But Hilke has some evidence on his side. According to a memo provided to the News that New Haven’s Corporation Counsel John Rose Jr. sent to the Board of Alders in 2015, the civilian review board mandated by the charter could in fact have subpoena power. The Special Act of 1899 granted the city’s Board of Alders and their committees and commissions the power to issue subpoenas. The civilian review board would be one of those commissions.

“The Civilian Review Board, as one ‘of the several boards of commissioners’ of the Board of Alders has the power to compel the attendance and testimony of witnesses before it by the issuance of subpoenas and the administration of oaths,” the memo reads.

Hilke said the ambiguous part of the memo is a line that says that neither the Board of Alders nor the Civilian Review Board has the power or authority to enforce a subpoena that would compel the attendance or testimony of a reluctant witness.

From Hilke’s perspective, that line simply describes the way a subpoena functions. If a person does not comply with a subpoena, then the investigator must go to a judge to enforce the warrant.

“That doesn’t make the power any weaker, it just means that the subpoena power that a civilian review board would hold works in the usual way,” Hilke said.

Roth — the Ward 7 alder and a graduate of Yale Law School — seconded Wilke’s assessment, saying that she read the memo the same way Hilke did.

In fact, many cities across the country have civilian review boards with subpoena power, demonstrating that it can be legal.

Regardless of the confusion over the legality of subpoena power for the civilian review board, there has never been any doubt that the Board of Alders itself has the ability to subpoena documents and witnesses. In 2010, for example, then-Ward 8 Alder Michael Smart used that authority to call members of the city’s tax appeals board to testify about tax assessment complaints.

Setting aside those legal questions, though, why is subpoena power so central to the community review board envisioned by the activists?

The short answer is that without subpoena power, the board would have no way to obtain information. For example, Hilke said, if someone were shot by a police officer outside Walgreens, without subpoena power, a civilian review board might struggle to obtain video footage or hear directly from the officer who fired the gun.

For the most part, Seaberry said, the subpoena power would go toward “boring” things like obtaining documents and surveillance camera footage rather than calling police officers to the stand. Across the country, the civilian review boards that do have subpoena power rarely use it to compel police officers to testify, Hilke said.

The “magic” of subpoena power, he emphasized, is that once a board has it, it rarely has to use it.

When people know they could be brought in front of a judge, they tend to start complying.

CONFRONTING THE UNION

In the 2013, New Haveners voted by referendum to create a civilian review board. But five years later, no such board exists, and the alders are not in the process of creating one.

After the referendum passed, the next step was to create an ordinance calling for the civilian review board. Though the language in the city charter carries the force of law, it contains no timeline for the creation of the civilian review board. In theory, debates over technicalities could drag on indefinitely.

And after the referendum, Seaberry said, “nobody was jumping at the opportunity.” One reason for the delay has been resistance from the New Haven Police Union Elm City Local. In an April 2017 hearing on the topic held by the Board of Alders Legislative and Public Safety committees, members of the New Haven Police Union expressed concern that parts of the civilian review board — such as the idea that it could have a role in deciding disciplinary action — would violate police union contracts.

When asked about their opinion on the civilian review board and about accusations that they have stalled board creation efforts, the New Haven Police Union said “the union has not been involved with any discussions regarding a [civilian review board] or been invited to any discussions.”

“Police are supposed to serve the public,” said Barrett, the legal director of the Connecticut ACLU. “Yet in America, at every level, police have rigged the system against everyday people seeking to hold their police departments accountable to democratic checks and balances.”

Eventually, activist groups like People Against Police Brutality began drafting the ordinance with the goal of introducing it themselves. In April 2017, they introduced the Malik Jones All-Civilian Review Board ordinance — which is based on Emma Jones’ original proposal and named after Malik Jones, the 21-year-old who was shot in 1997. The groups are still in the process of reviewing the language and taking community suggestions.

Desir, the law student and community organizer, rejected the police union’s argument about its contract. Even if disciplinary power interferes with the current language of the contract, Desir said, the board could simply delay the implementation of that particular power until the expiration of the contract. At that point, the police union would have to renegotiate with the city, and the new contract would have to align with city law.

Still, Desir acknowledged that politics is a “slow process.” The Board of Alders has also played a part in holding up the process, partly because of “fears of litigation if a strong civilian review board is enacted,” said Ioann Popov ’21, a member of the Police Brutality Mapping Project for the Yale Undergraduate Legal Aid Association.

Popov said that when he spoke with Ward 8 Alder Aaron Greenberg GRD ’18, Greenberg said the city has “dealt with [human relations]–related lawsuits in the past and does not want to face the legal action from the police union.” Greenberg referred questions about the board to the Public Safety Committee and Legislation Committee chairs Ward 12 Alder Gerald Antunes and Ward 13 Alder Rosa Santana. Antunes said that while he does not know why the civilian review board has been held up, he recognizes there is a “time coordination” issue when a joint committee is involved.

Regardless of those uncertainties and the police union’s opposition, New Haven may not actually have enough money to establish a civilian review board anytime soon.

The board that DeStefano established in 2001 lacked resources, which led to many complaints. And given the fiscal difficulties currently facing New Haven, a new board — even with subpoena power — could have the same problem. The mayor’s most recent budget proposal includes an 11 percent property tax hike, as well as cuts to various city departments. And there is little incentive for the Board of Alders to carve out room in the budget for an as-yet-nonexistent civilian review board.

Still, Desir and other advocates on the issue have called for 0.001 percent of the city’s budget — or roughly $600,000 — to be allocated for a civilian review board. Though it is “not a great climate” to be asking the city to spend more money, Desir noted, it is a relatively small amount.

“If something is a priority they find money for it,” Desir said.

Roth said the budget is a “huge question to address,” especially in this fiscal year. But she added that the city spent $9 million settling a wrongful imprisonment case stemming from police misconduct this year.

“Getting rid of bad apples ultimately is a very wise investment,” Roth said.

The civilian review board will not come to fruition before discussions of this year’s budget end, but the question remains: Where will the money ultimately come from? Will it come from the police department’s proposed budget? From some other section of the city’s budget?

That, Roth said, remains unclear.

BOARDS ACROSS THE COUNTRY

Still, for all the challenges, an independent civilian review board in New Haven is not an outlandish fantasy. According to data by the National Association for Civilian Oversight of Law Enforcement, there are approximately 144 such oversight agencies nationwide as of 2016. Desir and Hilke said that based on their research and discussions with other civilian review boards — including those in Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Newark, New Jersey — subpoena power, a paid independent staff and transparency are all key ingredients for an effective board. Desir said that the activist groups modeled their proposals for the Elm City on both the successes and failures of similar boards in other cities.

In 2001, Cincinnati saw some of the largest riots and demonstrations of civil disorder in U.S. history. As a result, in 2003, the Memorandum of Agreement and the Collaborative Agreement between the U.S. Department of Justice and the city of Cincinnati established the Citizen Complaint Authority.

Kim Neal, the director of the Citizen Complaint Authority in Cincinnati, said independence from the police allows the civilian review board to conduct its own investigations. Though the board counsel has subpoena power, she noted that, like Hilke suggested, it has never actually had to issue a subpoena. If a police officer refuses to comply or appear for the investigation, Neal said, she usually goes straight to the chief, who then orders the person to show up. She noted that most police chiefs don’t want the “public scrutiny” that would ensue if an officer did not comply with the investigation.

But she also said that Cincinnati has received pushback from the police union because officers “want to control the whole process.”

Neal said she thinks there has been a positive shift since the creation of the Citizen Complaint Authority, but she also added that many community members may not agree and issues are not all eradicated.

The Cincinnati police union did not respond to request for comment.

The Citizen Complaint Authority has made some meaningful changes. When Everette Howard died after being tased by a University of Cincinnati police officer in 2011, the authority looked into taser policy. Following the investigation, taser policies underwent serious reform. Now, taser shots to a person’s head, neck, eyes, throat, chest or genitals are forbidden, unless the action is taken in self-defense or as an effort to protect another person.

According to Hilke, the Cincinnati civilian review board sustains one in 12 complaints on average — demonstrating it has actual power and importance.

But one thing Cincinnati does not have is the ability to conduct administrative prosecutions for the most severe allegations of misconduct.

The only civilian review board in the country with that power is New York City’s, according to city officials there. Since its founding, the board has tried over 250 officers through the administrative prosecution process.

“Unfortunately,” Hilke said, “there has been no example of a civilian review being effective without having any power.”

MALIK ORDINANCE AND NEXT STEPS

In April 2017, at the last public Board of Alders hearing regarding the creation of a civilian review board, the Board of Alders introduced an ordinance — one that lacked many of the ingredients activists were pushing for. Without subpoena power or the ability to play a role in determining appropriate discipline for officers, activists at the meeting said the board did not solve the problems of trust it had with the New Haven Police Department.

Though there have been no Board of Alders committee meetings on the topic since, activists groups such as Justice for Jayson, CT Core and People Against Police Brutality have launched outreach campaigns and held community meetings to discuss the issue.

Now, one of the main proposals up for discussion is the Malik Jones All-Civilian Review Board proposal — an ordinance drafted by the members of People Against Police Brutality, including Hilke, Desir and Seaberry. This proposal creates a “civil review” committee on the Board of Alders, and the alder who chairs that committee would serve as a nonvoting member on the civilian review board. With an alder among its members, the board would have subpoena power.

This ordinance creates a board that would consist of 13 voting members — 10 that would come from citizen groups in the Elm City’s policing districts. Members would be appointed by the mayor and approved by the Board of Alders. The board would also have a full-time director, a staffer and two investigators. The proposed ordinance makes clear that voting members cannot be elected officials; they must be members of the general community.

The Malik Jones All-Civilian Review Board proposal would serve as a three-to-five-year pilot program and would be assessed for effectiveness at the end of the pilot period, according to the ordinance.

All in all, the proposed board would cost around $600,000 — about 1.5 percent of the police department’s budget. But amid the city’s current fiscal uncertainty and looming tax hikes, that money may prove difficult to acquire.

Roth said that the next Board of Alders committee meeting on the subject will hopefully take place in May or June of this year. But because the ordinance is a joint committee topic for the Legislation Committee and the Public Safety Committee, it is harder to coordinate a date.

Despite the long odds, Hilke said he feels like he has a “responsibility” to advocate for a civilian review board given the problem of police brutality in New Haven and other cities across the United States. His collaborators feel much the same way.

“A really good indicator of the health of a community is not just the relationship between the community and the police force,” Desir said, “but the institutional structure of the police force relative to the community.”

Ashna Gupta | ashna.gupta@yale.edu

Up Close:
Tearing down the ivory tower

Written by Adelaide Feibel

Photos by Jilly Mehlman

Published on April 12, 2018

Brian Sass stood behind a glass case containing about 40 small handguns, a “Hillary for Prison” sign plastered above him and a pistol holstered to his side. He was reluctant to talk to the News, until he heard the topic: what he thought of Ivy League universities like Yale.

His gruff voice reverberated throughout the small room, and his eyes, once scrunched up with suspicion, opened wide with excitement behind his glasses.

“Universities are degrading America and the Constitution,” he said.

Sass, a middle-aged white man wearing a baseball cap and blue jeans, had 90 credit hours when he dropped out of Hocking College, a technical school in southeast Ohio. College was too expensive, he said, and he did not think he would benefit from finishing the degree program.

Sass’ gun store is nestled between a pawn shop and small law firm on the main street of Circleville, a city in central Ohio with a population of just under 14,000 people. Framed by sprawling fields of dark green soybeans, stalks of corn and the occasional barn, the county seat of Pickaway County — which Donald Trump won by double digits in the 2016 presidential election — feels more like a small town than a city.

Asked whether high schoolers in Circleville apply to schools like Harvard or Yale, Sass chuckled and shook his head — the majority of the city’s residents could never afford to attend a place like Yale. The eight other Circleville residents interviewed for this article all agreed.

“If your daddy’s not rich or a politician, you don’t have a chance at going to an Ivy League school,” Sass said matter-of-factly. His colleague behind the register nodded in agreement.

A month later, sitting at a table in the Davenport College common room, Sam Chauncey ’57 discussed the history of higher education in the U.S. since World War II.

The black baby grand piano next to the table shone as it reflected the light streaming in through the colonial-style windows from the courtyard. A large blue rug, with an intricate red floral pattern, covered much of the hardwood floor, and on the white walls hung watercolor paintings of iconic buildings on campus.

Chauncey, a longtime Yale administrator and assistant to former Yale President Kingman Brewster, had spent a great deal of his professional life within the walls of Yale. Even after retirement, he has remained on campus as an advisor.

Asked to respond to the Circleville residents, Chauncey said people from poorer, more rural areas tend to mistakenly see elite universities as inaccessible and, as a result, “undesirable.”

“If I tell you about some beautiful island in the Caribbean where you couldn’t possibly afford to go, you’re going to poo poo it,” he said.

The stark contrast between Sass’ gun shop and the Davenport common room — and between Sass’ and Chauncey’s interpretations of that divide — speaks to a broader rift between small-town, Republican-leaning America and the nation’s institutes of higher learning.

According to a study by the Pew Research Center, as of 2017, 58 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning Independents believe that colleges and universities have a negative effect, while just 36 percent say their effect is positive. Just two years earlier in 2015, those numbers were reversed — 54 percent of Republicans said colleges have a positive effect on “the way things are going in the country,” while only 37 percent said their effect was negative.

With the belief in the value of higher education fast eroding among many Americans, Yale must ask itself: Have universities lost the public’s trust? And, if so, how can they regain it?

How we got here

Support for higher education was not always a partisan issue. Before World War II, relatively few people went to college. But that all changed with the passing of the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, better known as the GI Bill. Intended to help veterans of World War II, the bill granted stipends covering college or trade school tuition and expenses for the over 7 million veterans returning from overseas.

By 1947, almost 49 percent of college admits were veterans. According to Chauncey, the GI Bill inspired the growth of “a strong societal belief in higher education as essential for the good life.” Going to college became a “national thing” and higher education a national topic. Higher education during this time evolved and developed into a system, with community colleges at the lower level and the “great research university” at the top.

Presidents of major research universities like Yale, Harvard, University of California, Berkeley and Notre Dame became well-known names throughout the country — national leaders whom presidents of the United States “would die” to have in their cabinets. When University presidents gave a speech, which happened often in those days, political leaders and everyday Americans alike listened. According to Chauncey, every time a national commission was ordered in a time of unrest, a few University presidents would serve as members.

Because of university presidents’ social capital, it was hard for politicians to attack universities. When U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy went after so-called “Communist” academics in higher education during the Red Scare of the 1950s, the presidents of Harvard and Yale helped “kill” McCarthy’s career by speaking out against his actions, Chauncey said.

However, in the mid-’60s, the tide turned, as sometimes violent campus protests broke out across the country opposing the Vietnam War.

American Studies professor and Chair of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Senate Matthew Jacobson dates the rise of anti-university sentiment back to the launch of Ronald Reagan’s national political career in 1966, during which Reagan attacked the “spoiled, disrespectful” students of UC Berkeley, their “radical, permissive” professors and the university itself as a parasitic institution. Chauncey cited the election of former U.S. President Richard Nixon in 1968 as the turning point. According to Chauncey, Nixon “hated” the great research universities, and his insecurities about his own intellect manifested themselves in verbal attacks on elite institutions.

Although they date back to the 1960s, the efforts to discredit the university picked up steam in the 1980s, Jacobson said, as conservatives began to opt out of the university system and create “parallel” conservative think tanks such as The Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute, from which they attacked the “liberal university.”

More recent attacks on universities throughout the past two decades, Jacobson said, have framed institutions “as bastions of elite privilege and misguided liberalism,” as conservatives accused liberal college students and professors of suppressing ideological diversity and free speech in the face of campus protests.

Yale became a flashpoint for liberal campus protests in 2015 after former lecturer and assistant head of Silliman College Erika Christakis wrote an email questioning whether backlash against provocative Halloween costumes might have a negative effect on campus culture. Christakis’ email, as well as reports of a “white girls only” fraternity party on Yale’s campus, ultimately led to widespread protests against racial insensitivity by Yale students.

Among students’ demands were the renaming of Calhoun College — which bore the name of Yale class of 1804 alumnus, former South Carolina senator and fervent proponent of slavery John C. Calhoun — and the eradication of the title master, which described the faculty leader of a given residential college. Both these demands were met — after several years of protests.

Political science professor Steven Smith, whose research focuses on the history of political philosophy, said that the “fracas” over the renaming of Calhoun College and the title master severely damaged Yale’s reputation, ultimately adding fuel to the already fierce attack on academia. Though Smith was not personally against the renaming of Calhoun, he told the News that the controversy surrounding the question of renaming “made the University seem weak.”

The Halloween incident of 2015 sparked discussions on how to make the Yale faculty and student body more inclusive. But while members of the Yale community started talking about increasing the ethnic and gender diversity of its faculty, conservatives advocated for greater ideological diversity on college campuses.

The demand for more conservative professors stems from the commonly held belief that universities and the faculty members who work at them are predominantly liberal in their political beliefs. A nationwide study published last year in the electronic journal Econ Journal Watch found that Democratic professors outnumber Republicans by a ratio of 12 to 1.

Frederick Hess, Director of Education Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, told the News that universities deserve the increasing animosity coming their way. According to Hess, universities’ “ideologically homogeneous” faculties fail to engage respectfully with those who disagree with them, creating stifling environments for students who do not share the worldviews of universities like Yale.

“A place like Yale should be interested in ensuring that its faculty and doctoral students represent a rich and diverse set of experiences,” Hess said. “These ongoing campus debates create renewed energy in making sure everyone feels they belong, that everyone feels heard and that everybody feels safe, and those are all healthy things. But everybody feeling safe does not mean everyone feeling safe or everyone feeling heard as long as they agree with progressive political priorities.”

“Snotty kids in higher classes”

Unlike several other Circleville residents, a middle school principal, who asked for anonymity for privacy reasons, agreed to an interview without hesitation. With a hot pink workout zip-up and a neatly banded blonde ponytail, she gave off an aura of confidence.

“I was the first person in my family to go to college. My parents made it very clear from a young age that it was an expectation that I would go further in school than they did, so academics were always the primary concern in our household,” she said as she sipped her latte.

The middle school principal voted for Trump in 2016. But not once in her interview with the News did she specifically criticize the liberal nature of universities. In fact, the only time she mentioned it was at the very end of the interview when asked whether the Ivy League’s reputation as liberal dissuaded Circleville students from applying.

And she wasn’t alone. Only two out of the nine Circleville residents interviewed identified the liberal nature of universities as the primary cause of the rise of negative attitudes towards higher education. Instead, the majority of those interviewed said that economics, not politics, is driving the wedge between universities and communities like theirs.

“Economically, there’s been a shift that’s made it undesirable to have a college degree or even an advanced degree because it’s not creating a sustainable workforce,” the middle school principal said.

Politicians echo this sentiment. For example, during the 2016 Republican presidential debate, U.S. Senator Marco Rubio, R-Fla, argued for more welders and “less philosophers,” since, according to Rubio, welders make more money than philosophers.

Lynn Pasquerella, president of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, of which Yale is a member, said that many are beginning to lose faith in the notion that a college degree “will help you live a better life than your parents,” which she called a “decoupling of higher education from the American dream.”

Perhaps the rhetoric surrounding the depreciation of a college degree has gained traction in recent years because statistically, adults are far less likely now to live lives better than those of their parents, irrespective of education levels.

According to a study at UC Berkeley by professor Raj Chetty, the American dream is fading. Rates of absolute mobility — the percentage of children earning more money than their parents — have fallen from approximately 90 percent for children born in 1940 to 50 percent for children born in the 1980s. Though the trend has occurred across the entire income distribution, the largest declines are observed in middle class families. The industrial Midwest is being hit particularly hard by this trend. In Ohio, for instance, the percentage of children who earn more than their parents dropped 45 points from the 1940s to the 1980s.

But statistics show that, on average, a college degree helps promote higher-paying careers.

The Pew Research Center found that millennial college graduates ages 25 to 32 who are working full time earn more annually — about $17,500 more — than employed young adults holding only a high school diploma, a pay gap that was significantly smaller in previous generations. College-educated millennials are also significantly less likely to be unemployed — 3.8 percent versus 12.2 percent.

Still, for many Circleville residents, access to the Ivy League’s “ivory tower” and the financial promise it represents seems out of reach. Only 15 percent of Circleville residents over the age of 25 have bachelor’s degrees, compared to a national average of 33 percent.

Circleville resident Crisha Webber said that Ivy League schools are reserved for “snotty kids in higher classes.” And Jim Mason, whose Circleville furniture store has been in the family for more than 100 years, said families from Circleville cannot afford to send their children to places like Yale.

“A lot of people here are more frugal and don’t want to waste $50,000 on an Ivy League school,” he said.

Lauren Esteph, who manages a family-owned bookstore, considered going to college to cultivate her skills in writing. But it ultimately did not seem like “the right decision.”

“Cost was one of the things that made me question it because if I wasn’t set or had my heart set on this thing I wanted. If I wasn’t going to use it, then it kind of scared me a little bit,” Esteph said. “I probably could have gotten a scholarship or grant or something, but am I going to be wasting all these resources and say my writing never goes anywhere? That’s gonna be a lot of money. I’m gonna be paying it off all the rest of my life.”

Yale has expanded outreach and financial aid over the past decade to students from lower-income households. With a median family income of about $40,000, the majority of Circleville households would pay nothing for a Yale education, since any family that makes under $65,000 per year qualifies for full financial aid — or a $0 expected parental contribution.

Still, the “higher class” students greatly outnumber those of lower socio-economic status. At Yale, 16.3 percent of students come from the bottom 60 percent of the income scale, while 18.7 percent of Yale students come from the top 1 percent.

“[Ivy League universities] need to get out of their big bubble and come down and see places like Circleville,” Webber said.

To Sass, who believes that universities are “liberal breeding grounds” where students are not taught to think for themselves but instead to swallow blindly whatever their professors teach them, recruitment of a more ideologically diverse set of professors is essential if higher education institutions want to regain the trust and respect of the American people.

However, to Executive Director of the Pickaway County Visitor’s Bureau and Circleville resident Tim Wilson, the importance of bringing more conservative voices into the university community does not stem from a concern about the “attack on free speech” or the “liberal breeding ground” that universities have allegedly become. Rather, it comes from his desire to lessen the distance between the liberal “ivory towers” of universities like Yale and conservative middle America.

“There’s always going to be a struggle between the liberals and conservatives in what direction we want the country to head in,” he said. “I suppose some of it comes from a lack of understanding and lack of communication between the groups. The more you put people with different opinions together, the more they work it out.”

To the majority of Circleville residents interviewed, the task of closing this divide falls on the next generation. They believe elite universities like Yale should be doing more to recruit students from smaller towns and conservative areas like Circleville.

The middle school principal said that schools in smaller communities often get overlooked even though they have “a great potential pool.”

Mason believes schools like Yale do not merely overlook applicants from small conservative towns. Rather, these institutions are so contemptuous of the way of life in rural, conservative America that they deliberately do not accept students from these areas.

“If I write it in red ink or if I write in blue ink, does that make a difference?” he said. “Are they going to turn me down because I’m from Corn Country, Ohio? I think they probably would.”

Whose problem to fix?

For the past 20 years, molecular, cellular and developmental biology professor Valerie Horsley has dreamed of returning to her grandmother’s church and talking to the congregation about the flu vaccine. Most of the attendants get a flu vaccine every year, since flu viruses evolve. But the churchgoers do not believe in evolution, she said.

Now, Horsley is speaking to large crowds about the value and validity of science to the economy and to personal well-being. But none of those groups are the congregation at her grandmother’s church in the South, where she was born. Rather, she is courting the votes of fellow Democrats in a primary election for the 17th district seat in Connecticut State Senate this August.

Horsley said she does not believe greater communication on the part of universities about their value to society would do anything to mitigate the current partisan attack of academia. She sees the assault as “an orchestrated platform” in the Republican Party to promote the “uneducation of America” and to build a base that “hates the elites.”

“The GOP doesn’t want any science. They don’t want education. They just want the wealthy 1 percent to have the wealth,” Horsley said. “It’s not really knowing that research would change their mind about the value of the university.”

For Horsley and some professors and administrators interviewed, blame for the rise in negative attitudes towards higher education lies with the Republican Party and the Trump administration. But others acknowledge that the fact that Circleville residents and others throughout the country considers universities inaccessible, distant and elitist represents a real problem that Yale and its peers have a responsibility to address.

Pasquerella said the academy as an institution has for too long been complicit in creating the “ivory tower” — a place out of touch with the concerns of regular people and a “site of exclusion for many” — by rewarding “narrow, technical articles in peer reviewed journals” rather than the high-impact practices of professors in service to the broader community.

Still, Yale faculty members interviewed reached no broad consensus on how exactly to combat the perception of Yale and its peers as “ivory towers” or to identify tangible actions Yale should take.

Those interviewed were lukewarm about the Circleville residents’ suggestions that recruiting faculty members and students with more conservative views could help combat negative attitudes toward universities today.

Though Smith said he does not think Yale should hire people on the basis of their political commitments, he pressed the University to be more proactive in its recruitment of faculty members who prioritize the values of tradition, respect for history and patriotism over multiculturalism.

Jacobson, on the other hand, told the News that he doubted hiring more conservative professors would weaken antipathy toward academia, since the Republican Party’s disparagement of universities with language like “snowflakes,” “triggers,” “political correctness” and “attacks on free speech” bears no resemblance to his day-to-day observations about what actually happens on campus.

To Horsley, the tendency of professors to skew liberal is inevitable because, as academics, they go through a training program that forces them to interact more with diverse subsets of the population, which Horsley argued is “not part of the conservative platform.” She added that the University should hire professors based on their expertise, not their ideology.

Horsley, who was born in Alabama and grew up outside of Atlanta, said she knows from her own experience that students from the middle of the country do not want to go to universities in other parts of the country. Horsley went to college in South Carolina and never thought about applying to Yale or other East Coast schools.

“There’s lot of regionality about it,” she said. “It’s often a painting of the West and East coasts as being the problem and pitting the rest of the country against those two coasts to gain power.”

Higher education as a public good

Some professors and administrators suggested that the “ivory tower effect” can be mitigated by better communicating the value of the intellectual capital that universities produce through research.

The effects of this research are ubiquitous in the lives of everyday Americans. But most do not think about the way university research contributes to the economy, to democracy or to individual well-being when they think about institutions of higher education, according to Pasquerella. In fact, she said, they rarely think about research at all. None of the nine Circleville residents mentioned the research that universities produce when discussing attitudes toward universities.

“There are few problems our society has solved — medical problems, public health problems, military problems, technological problems, ethical problems, problems of production and distribution — that weren’t solved by someone trained in a university,” Jacobson said. “Every time you take a pill, thank a university. But most Americans don’t think about the production of knowledge this way at all, and we are partly to blame for not getting that word out.”

This is part of a broader shift away from the notion of higher education as “a public good” to viewing it as a “private commodity,” Pasquerella said. The public views universities as a place that confers degrees, which will eventually help them find employment, not a public good that benefits everyone in a community or in society as a whole.

According to Director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication Anthony Leiserowitz, there are thousands of things universities like Yale can do to engage the local, state, national and global communities and fight that trend. They just need to make it a priority.

Some professors already have taken initiative to connect their work to the lives of everyday Americans.

If Horsley is elected state senator, she will be able to advocate for and promote higher education outside the gates of Yale. She said she hopes to promote scientific research and industries based in science — such as information technology, tech manufacturing and bioscience — as ways to effectively bolster the state’s economy.

While she believes serving in public office “is one of the major things I’m supposed to do in the world,” she noted that her colleagues find it difficult to prioritize outreach and communication because of their busy schedules.

“It’s really easy to hole yourself up in your office, your lab and your classroom all day and then go home,” Horsley said.

Jacobson’s efforts to break down the barriers of the “ivory tower” are more institutional in nature. Yale’s public humanities program, which he co-directs, works to promote museum exhibits, documentary films and digital humanities projects that expand humanities discourse to a wider range of local and regional institutions, as well as their respective publics.

“Our work should not be so cloistered, nor should we regard one another as our only audience, regardless of what field we’re in,” Jacobson said.

Fallible human beings

Although Horsley’s campaign for office and Jacobson’s public humanities program may help tear down the barriers the “ivory tower” creates, these initiatives are local and regional rather than national. They do not reach beyond the New England area to towns like Circleville in the heart of America, where much of the distrust and devaluation of universities originated.

Chauncey called for university presidents again to serve as national leaders and as the “primary spokespeople” on how institutions like Yale “serve the national interests.”

Today, university presidents are no longer “symbolic national leaders,” which Chauncey attributes to the fact that university trustees select presidents for their ability to manage the university internally and raise money rather than for their “innate leadership qualities.” He added that university presidents are so busy handling the administrative side of the university that they also simply might not have the time to give speeches or write opinion pieces.

But according to political science lecturer and West Virginia native Michael Fotos ’78, if universities hope to recapture the hearts and minds of the public, they must reach out directly to underserved populations in middle America, like the people of Circleville. It is essential, he said, that members of universities, administrators and professors alike, step outside the “blue bubble” in which everyone presumes that the “New York Times–Washington Post worldview is reasonable, just and universally valid.”

Expanding programs that give veterans the opportunity to attend institutions of higher education, such as Yale’s Eli Whitney Program, would be a good start, according to Fotos. These types of programs help Yale and its peers reach “an underserved but rich-in-intellectual-capacity group of students” and further engage with a diverse subset of the American population.

But these programs have not yet bridged the distance between Yale on the East Coast and rural communities like Circleville in the heart of the United States.

Inside the gun shop, Sass let out a long sigh, as he rested his elbows atop the glass display case of pistols. He had finished his fiery tirade against the “ivory tower” of Yale, and his eyes, once twinkling with excitement, betrayed newfound weariness.

Sass turned away, apparently lost in thought. But he raised his head to make one final comment.

“A lot of students and college professors see themselves as infallible,” he said. “They need to see themselves as fallible human beings.”

Adelaide Feibel | adelaide.feibel@yale.edu

Incorporating Connecticut:
Urbanizing Business in a Suburban State

Written by Isabel Bysiewicz

Photos by Vivek Suri

Published on March 4, 2018

Alexion returned to New Haven with a pair of oversized scissors and a big blue ribbon. Dignitaries gathered to welcome the company. Yale University President Peter Salovey posed next to to Sens. Chris Murphy and Richard Blumenthal as local news channels filmed the celebration. New Haven Rep. Rosa DeLauro and Mayor Toni Harp beamed into the cameras. Alexion’s CEO and chair proudly shared the honor of the ribbon clipping with children who had benefited from the pharmaceutical company’s drugs.

In February 2016, after a 16-year absence, Alexion was coming home. And the reunion was even sweeter than anticipated. New Haven took pride in the pharmaceutical company’s choice to build a brand-new 10-story headquarters that, in its final form, exceeded expectations: 14 stories of shimmering glass with roughly 500,000 square feet of laboratory and office space occupied prime real estate at 100 College St. No one could miss the new headquarters when merging off of the interstate.

As hopeful as the reunion was, it would prove short lived. Two years later, the glass icon of Downtown stands as an uncomfortable reminder of what might have been. After all, Alexion, like so many Connecticut companies before it, was fleeing to Boston.

Alexion announced sweeping restructuring plans in September 2017: It would lay off 20 percent of its employees worldwide and close its facility in Rhode Island. Amid these changes, the company announced in a statement that a move to Boston in mid-2018 would provide a larger “talent pool and a variety of life-sciences partners to further support future growth initiatives.”

The promises of the ribbon-cutting were now broken, but, in hindsight, the move should not have been a shock: When management changed in early 2017, Alexion began to set its sights on more prominent cities. But it was a disappointment nonetheless. Local representatives were quick to share their negative feelings about the move and push back on the notion that the company only relocated to meet its financial and employee needs.

“Alexion’s decision to move their headquarters out of New Haven is shocking and shameful. New Haven is home to some of the most talented and brightest minds in the world, and Alexion will be worse off for leaving, both financially and intellectually,” DeLauro said.

In a press release issued shortly after the announcement, the Connecticut Department of Economic and Community Development said that, even though Alexion will maintain a significant number of employees in state, all of the $20 million loan and $6 million grant must be repaid — with interest and penalties — to the department in accordance with the terms of the agreement.

“There are a lot of startups, and some progress, and some don’t, but what you’re hoping for is a breakout company,” Executive Director of the Connecticut Bioscience Growth Council Paul Pescattlo said. “Alexion was our breakout company.”

BORN & RAISED

Yale professor Leonard Bell founded Alexion Pharmaceuticals Inc., a company that now concentrates on serving patients with rare diseases, as a tech startup in Science Park in 1992, but it has since transformed into a publicly traded giant.

Alexion grew up alongside a burgeoning biotechnology industry in New Haven, which was virtually nonexistent in the 1970s. At that time, only 21 percent of city jobs were in the fields of education and health care, a number that has since doubled. Science Park, too, is far ahead of where it was in the 1990s, when it was built on the site of the former Winchester Repeating Arms Company. At the time, parking lots weren’t paved, and a gate prohibited residents from entering the complex without permission.

No one expected the company to be so large, according to New Haven Economic Development Administrator Matthew Nemerson SOM ’81.

Jon Soderstrom, the managing director of the Office of Cooperative Research at Yale, is on a mission to help support startups. The office provides licensing to existing companies, encourages corporate sponsorships for research with faculty members and helps others launch new ventures based on the intellectual property available.

Eighty percent of Yale’s research budget is in the life sciences, Soderstrom said, so a lot of effort goes into the biotech industry. According to Soderstrom, Yale’s efforts to stimulate new ventures have paid off. Last year, Yale supported 11 venture-backed companies that raised $80 million, and over the last decade, 60 ventures have raised $700 million, Soderstrom said.

But even among the many other Yale-affiliated biotech projects, Alexion stood head and shoulders above the rest. As of 2016, it had 3,000 employees and served patients in 50 countries. In 2011, Alexion was added to the Nasdaq-100, a stock market index of the 100 largest nonfinancial stocks traded on the Nasdaq composite. A year later, the company joined the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index.

Connecticut, for its part, has done a lot more than just praise Alexion. The state offered financial help in the form of tax breaks and incentives. In 2012, the company received $50 million from Connecticut taxpayers as part of a new economic development program. Throughout Gov. Dannel Malloy’s administration, Alexion continued to profit from tax breaks codified under state law.

Malloy, like many of the state’s residents, regarded Alexion’s transformation from a small startup to a global company as one of Connecticut’s success stories.

The First Five job creation initiative, which Connecticut rolled out in 2011, provides direct state aid and tax breaks to businesses that create a minimum of 200 full-time jobs in the state within two or five years, depending on the size of a given company’s investment, from the time their applications to the program are approved. Alexion, Cigna, ESPN and NBC Sports all signed up for the program.

According to the governor’s website, the program — which Malloy signed into law on July 8, 2011 — was designed to attract new companies from other states, retain companies already in Connecticut and encourage businesses to expand.

Connecticut did not stop there. Large investments in other projects have proved successful. Another biotechnology hub is growing in Storrs, just 60 miles away from New Haven.

In 2014, Jackson Laboratory opened a 4-story, 183,500-square-foot space on the campus of the University of Connecticut Health Center in Farmington. The lab focuses on discovering genomic causes for diseases. In 2011, a Democrat-controlled state legislature made a $291 million investment in Jackson Lab. The facility is projected create 300 jobs in research and technology by 2024.

Like Alexion, the Jackson Laboratory started small. The nonprofit was founded as a cancer research center in Bar Harbor, Maine, in 1929.

The emergence of industry centers in New Haven and Storrs is not a coincidence. The main driver of the biotech industry is the quantity and quality of academic, basic and life sciences research, according to Pescattlo. Storrs has the nearby University of Connecticut, and New Haven has Yale.

THE CONNECTICUT LAG

Connecticut has struggled more than other states to keep major employers and taxpayers, perhaps because it lacks a major city to attract companies amid the recent trend of urbanization. Recent high-profile departures from suburban areas and small cities fall in line with a national pattern of large companies moving to larger urban centers. It seems that the pendulum of investment and growth has swung away from the countryside to city centers. Companies no longer want to isolate themselves from the rest of the world on quiet campuses but instead seek the energy of urban networks.

Nemerson, New Haven’s economic development administrator, said that no one who was watching Alexion closely was surprised by the move. Once founder Leonard Bell left the position of CEO in 2015, the company’s personal ties to New Haven seemed less significant.

“I think a lot of people thought it was only a matter of time,” Nemerson said. “[The move] was disappointing, not surprising.”

In Rhode Island, Hasbro Inc., the third largest toy maker in the world, moved 350 jobs to Providence from smaller towns in the state. In Illinois, dozens of companies, including The Kraft Heinz Company, an American food company, moved from the suburbs closer to Chicago. Although the suburbs still hold the majority of the metropolitan workforce, downtown areas are closing in on that difference. Between 1996 and 2013, the proportion of metro area jobs within three miles of a city center grew 7 percentage points, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

But Connecticut has no major city. Hartford and Bridgeport are not as large as Chicago or even Providence and have yet to solve major urban problems such as public transportation, poverty and crime within city limits. If a business cannot find what it needs from New Haven’s midsize population, its next step is generally to leave the state.

Alexion’s move is only one of several significant departures from the state in recent years. General Electric Co., a multinational conglomerate corporation, announced on Jan. 13, 2016, that it would leave Fairfield, where it had been headquartered since 1974. In 2017, GE ranked as the 13th-largest firm in the nation by gross revenue, according to Fortune magazine. In 2018, GE moved its global headquarters to Boston.

After the company announced it was considering a relocation, several states offered GE incentives to leave suburban Connecticut. With tax incentives from Massachusetts, the move would be cost-neutral. The company received over $150 billion in incentives and grants from Boston and the state of Massachusetts, which is one of the top investors in research and development. In addition, Boston will position the company in closer proximity to a variety of technology startups and global conglomerates in the seaside area.

Following GE’s departure, Malloy continued to praise the bioscience industry. In response to the news, Malloy still noted Connecticut’s draw to large companies on Channel 8 News.

“You can’t objectively look at Connecticut and not appreciate that we are making progress, whether that takes us to the level one company wants or sees in its future, I can’t tell you,” Malloy told the local news outlet.

But last summer Connecticut residents could not help but notice that, when Aetna Inc., a health care company and one of Hartford’s top employers and taxpayers, announced a $100 million relocation to New York City in June 2017, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio approved a $9.6 million incentive plan for Aetna.

GE Chairman and CEO Jeffrey Immelt has said that the company’s relocation to the Seaport District of Boston would provide a more attractive, technologically savvy workforce, in line with the company’s push to develop a larger software scale. And if a technologically savvy workforce is what Immelt is looking for, Connecticut may not have been the right place to find it. Boston is home to over 50 colleges and universities, while Fairfield only hosts a few.

Millennials, for their own part, may play a significant role in the anti-suburban trend. New Haven demonstrates this phenomenon. Only 138 of the 1,399 Yale students in the class of 2016 stayed in New Haven after graduation, according to the Yale Office of Career Strategy. Nemerson noted that New Haven’s location, in between Boston and New York, is a challenge. He said that companies tend to move within a 100-mile radius. Boston is 130 miles from the Elm City, and New York is less than 70. Because these cities are so close, New Haven often loses out, but it also means that New Haven has the potential to gain.

“People often say how horrible it is that young people are leaving Connecticut. But they’re just actually moving to New York and Boston. And they can still be home, they can see their parents, they can see their friends, they’re an hour away. If you were in Los Angeles and you moved an hour away, you might still be in Los Angeles,” Nemerson said.

Yet some are still skeptical of the reasons behind large corporate moves. In March 2017, Ludwig Hantson, a resident of Boston, was named the CEO of Alexion, three months before the move was announced. Soderstrom described Alexion’s stated desire to gain access to a larger pool of highly skilled workers as “puffery.” Pescattlo noted that most members of Alexion’s new management team had no connection to Connecticut and New Haven but had built their careers in Boston.

And still, recent news has not all been sour. Last December, news broke that CVS Corporation would purchase Aetna for $69 billion, making the company’s planned move uncertain. And in early January, de Blasio withdrew the incentive proposal.

On Jan. 12, Hartford Eyewitness News Channel 3 reported that Carolyn Castel, the vice president for corporate communications for CVS Health, said in an email that CVS views Hartford as “the future location of our center of excellence for the insurance business.”

Soderstrom says that Connecticut is quick to highlight what it is doing wrong or what it could have done better but often doesn’t make note of its improvements.

But, though it may not be useful to harp on the past departures, they do point to larger questions facing Connecticut. The reality is that Connecticut has experienced a decadelong decline in the number of bioscience jobs. The reality is that Connecticut needs to take a critical look at its future in bioscience.

SO WHAT NOW?

Connecticut is lagging behind other states. Conglomeration of worldwide companies and the changing demographics of the workforce have fostered an environment of competition among states. It may be dangerous to chalk departures up to corporate management and the shifting desire to be near flashy cities. Changes can make Connecticut more of a competitor.

If Alexion’s move says anything, it is that providing large companies with major tax breaks will likely not be enough to incentivize them to stay in state. And even if Connecticut legislators wanted to do more, the state’s finances may be an insurmountable barrier. Last year, after the state added more than a billion to its debt, the Connecticut General Assembly passed a new, far more restrictive state budget. Pescattlo, the head of the Connecticut Bioscience Growth Council, says that the most signficant “macro” issue in the state is its budget.

“[Companies] do their research. And they find that Connecticut has really, really deep fiscal issues and deep budget problems. And they make a calculation [of] what’s going to happen in 15 years given this fiscal mess we’re in. And … unless things change in a fundamental way, it looks like higher taxes and fewer services, and that’s not a good profile to attract companies.”

But even if the state solves its budget crisis — something unlikely to happen without major changes — several issues make Connecticut particularly unfavorable relative to other states.

First, despite the small area of the state and constant praise for its ideal location between Boston and New York, transportation remains a problem throughout the state. Executive Director of DataHaven Mark Abraham said that, while New Haven and smaller cities and suburbs serve smaller companies and startups well, larger companies gravitate toward sites with commodities such as long, heavy railroads and subway systems. Connecticut is still fighting to fund infrastructure.

On Jan. 30, a debate arose between Malloy and the state’s top Republican lawmakers over transportation, a center point of the governor’s proposed budget. While Democrats expressed urgency to make strides on the issue, many Republicans want to wait on any major infrastructure spending. State Sen. Len Fasano, R-North Haven, thinks that Democrats are trying to do too much too soon.

“One of the biggest challenges facing our state is the decadeslong refusal to invest in our roads, bridges, tunnels and rail,” Malloy spokeswoman Kelly Donnelly said on Jan. 30, according to the Hartford Business Journal. “Yet, perplexingly, the Republican leaders’ solution is to further slash our transportation investment.”

2018 may not be the year for a major economic stimulus package, as elections across the state will likely be contested.

Connecticut may also not be able to offer the potential employee pool that other states can. In a statement issued after GE announced its departure, which was due in part to the availability of skilled workers, the governor’s office responded to the move: “Businesses care about talent, and we will continue our investments in our higher education system in order to connect them to the needs of high-tech employers.”

Even though Malloy has made a point of defending the public education system, Connecticut has recently had difficulty funding state colleges. In the state budget passed last year, the University of Connecticut’s state funding was cut by $139 million, enough for students to mount a #SaveUConn campaign to air their grievances.

Though New Haven has actively pursued large companies, major proposals have not proved fruitful, in part due to faults in state operation.

In October 2016, New Haven, in conjunction with Bridgeport, submitted a proposal to host the new Amazon.com Inc. headquarters. The New Haven–Bridgeport proposal would have provided the company with roughly 16 million square feet of office space. In addition, major statewide officials praised a Hartford–Stamford joint offer. But, on Jan. 18, Amazon released a list of 20 finalist cities out of the 238 that had submitted proposals. The list included New York and Boston but no Connecticut entree.

MORE THAN AN OUTPOST

In 2014, an article in FierceBiotech, an online publication, ranked New Haven as the 13th best biotech city that year, ahead of Los Angeles and Chicago.

“Connecticut may not be the first place that biotech entrepreneurs have in mind when they start a company, but when the circumstances are right it can make a lot of sense,” the article read.

Soderstrom, the managing director of the Office of Cooperative Research at Yale, said that Alexion represents the success of Yale’s Science Park, and the company’s departure will not put the brakes on any projects or Sciences Park’s future successes. He disagrees with any assessment that Alexion’s leave will cause long-term trouble for the city, instead arguing that Alexion was a symbol of a burgeoning critical mass of bioscience innovation in New Haven.

While Alexion’s move has shocked residents across the state, other biotech companies in New Haven are improving. The 2014 FierceBiotech article did not mention Alexion, but it did note that, in 2013, Canaan Partners’ Tim Shannon launched another Yale startup. Arvinas Inc. is a New Haven–based private biopharmaceutical company that aims to produce protein degradation therapeutics for cancers and other rare diseases.

Arvinas announced major partnerships at the end of last year and the start of this year, one with Genentech Inc. and one with Pfizer Inc. The company is poised to perform better this year, as they move forward with clinical development and filing new drug applications.

BioHaven Pharmaceutical, a clinical-stage pharmaceutical company that targets neurological disorders, was one of the strongest biotech initial public offerings on the New York Stock Exchange according to Soderstrom.

There is a new fashion in the life sciences industry. Companies want to be close to the academic research that spawned their company, as well as potential scientists and employees, Pescatllo said. In a sense, companies want to be near their competitors.

Soderstrom seemed tired of having to re-explain why it’s time to move past Alexion’s departure.

“The Alexion thing was a time to celebrate. It was a brand new building in the center of the city,” Soderstrom said. “But it is just one of those things that happens.”

Alexion’s presence in the city will not come to a complete halt. Research will continue in New Haven — Alexion CEO Ludwig Hantson said that 450 workers will stay Downtown, and the city will now be home to the company’s “Center of Excellence.”

Abraham stressed that, while moving headquarters can be symbolic, it does not always mean a large base of workers will move with it. For example, insurance company The Travelers Companies Inc. moved headquarters to New York, but its Hartford office is still its largest branch. Abraham said that the fact that Alexion has retained research and parts of its financial and administrative branch in New Haven indicates an ongoing relationship with the city.

The fashion in the life sciences industry may now be urban settings with a fluid workforce cross-pollination, Pescattlo said, but the trend may not be permanent. He pointed to high housing costs and congestion as incentives push employees and companies in the other direction.

“Fashions come and go. There is probably an overemphasis on that density, and I think we may have reached a peak,” Pescattlo said. “I could see a shift back to what Connecticut has.”

Now Connecticut has to adjust to the times or wait for another swing of the pendulum.

DKE's open secret:
Eight more women make accusations against fraternity

Written by Britton O'Daly

Photos by Surbhi Bharadwaj

Published on February 20, 2018

Editor’s note: Two days after this story was published, Yale College Dean Marvin Chun opened an investigation into DKE’s sexual climate.

The Delta Kappa Epsilon house on Lake Place has gone quiet this semester, as DKE grapples with public accusations of sexual misconduct against the Yale chapter’s former president, Luke Persichetti, now expelled from the fraternity, and another DKE member who resigned his membership in January.

After stories in the News and Business Insider detailed the allegations against Persichetti — who was suspended by Yale in March 2017 until the end of the current semester for “penetration without consent” — DKE put a halt to all social activities and began meeting with administrators and campus groups to devise a plan to improve the fraternity’s sexual climate.

But the problem of sexual assault at DKE runs deeper than two former brothers, according to eight women who shared previously unreported stories of sexual misconduct by DKE members with the News and more than 30 interviews with Yale sorority members, first-year counsellors and Communication and Consent Educators. The majority of those interviewed said the problem is not just a few bad apples — it’s an institutional culture that tolerates sexual misconduct. Still, some students interviewed cautioned that DKE is not alone, emphasizing that sexual misconduct takes place in fraternities and other social spaces all over campus.

The second DKE brother accused of nonconsensual sex is currently a senior. His accuser filed a formal complaint against him with Yale last month, and he is now being investigated by the University-Wide Committee on Sexual Misconduct, according to two sources close to the situation.

In interviews over the last month, four additional female undergraduates told the News that the same former DKE member forced them into unwanted sexual encounters.

In addition to those accusations, four other women shared previously unreported stories with the News about alleged sexual misconduct by other DKE members, speaking on the condition of anonymity to protect their privacy and avoid social repercussions. All eight women’s accounts — which range from stories of forcible kissing and groping at parties to nonconsensual sex in Yale suites and off-campus houses — were corroborated by text messages, direct witnesses or friends whom the women later told about the alleged incidents. Some took place in the DKE house, some in dorm rooms on Yale’s campus and others in off-campus party spots like Toad’s Place. The stories span a two-year period, from fall 2014 to spring 2017, and involve a total of five current or former members of DKE.

For a variety of reasons, none of the eight women has filed a formal Title IX complaint against the man she says assaulted her. The four women who alleged that the same former DKE member coerced them into nonconsensual sex all named him on the record. The News has chosen not to identify the alleged assailant because his accusers have all requested anonymity and because Yale has not found that he committed an offense. Of the other four women, three could identify their assailants, and all three declined to name them on the record.

In a statement to the News, a DKE spokesman said the fraternity “openly and vigorously” encourages members of the Yale community to take complaints of sexual misconduct to the University. The statement emphasized that DKE has a “zero tolerance policy” of expelling members who are found to have breached Yale’s Title IX regulations.

“Without knowing the full details of these allegations and given that most DKE social events are open to every Yale student, we have no way of knowing whether DKE members were involved in all of these cases,” the statement said. “We are also, however, all entirely aware that we have failed to promote a welcoming and safe space at our events in the past. That is why we completed a working group report last week to identify reforms for how DKE can improve.”

“I KNEW I WASN’T OK WITH IT”

“I’ll walk you home.”

It was 1 a.m. on a warm, misty night in the early fall of 2014. A first-year woman stood alone on Lake Place, down the street from the DKE fraternity house, texting friends to ask where they had gone. It was only the second or third time she’d attended a DKE party. As she typed on her phone, a tall, muscular first year who went on to pledge DKE that semester approached to ask if he could walk her home.

“I just remember saying, ‘No, no thank you,’” the woman recalled earlier last month. “He said, ‘No, it’s OK, I’m just walking you home.’”

She was still getting used to campus life and doubted she could convince him to leave her alone. She’d also had a few drinks. So with the man following behind her, she began the 10-minute walk from Lake Place to Old Campus. She felt exhausted after a long night out and was not fully alert.

The male student walked behind her, never trailing by more than a couple of feet. He made a few light attempts at small talk but otherwise said little. As they walked, she kept telling him, “No, no thank you. Please don’t walk me home.”

When they arrived at her entryway, he followed her inside. But it was only when she’d reached her common room that she turned around and realized the man had entered her suite.

“I was pretty intoxicated, but I hadn’t blacked out or anything, so I remember it,” she said. “I remember standing there thinking, ‘How in the world? Why [is he] in my common room?’ My suitemates weren’t there or they were asleep or they were still out, and basically he came into my room.”

While she does not remember precisely what happened next, she said, she knows the man — who is now a DKE member and a Yale senior — soon began having unprotected nonconsensual sex with her. She said he took advantage of her delirious state.

“I wasn’t punched or pushed or anything physical like that, so yeah, more taken advantage of. … It was late at night, and I was exhausted. I don’t remember being asked if I was OK with what was happening, and I definitely didn’t consent to unprotected sex,” she said. “I knew I wasn’t OK with it. But I just didn’t know that it was something I could report or talk to someone about because it wasn’t the blunt rape that happens in the movies.”

The woman did not report the incident to Yale. But she emphasized that she never would have agreed to unprotected sex under any circumstances.

The woman kept the story to herself until 2017, when a friend recounted a similar experience involving a different DKE brother. More than three years after the fact, she acknowledges she has no way to prove her story: She never texted her friends to say that a man was following her home, and she never wrote about the experience in a diary. But a friend of the woman and her current boyfriend both corroborated her account, saying she told them the same story three years after the alleged assault took place and three months before she shared her memories of the night with the News.

It was not the only time that semester that the woman had a bad experience at DKE, she said.

At a separate party at the DKE house in fall 2014, the student said, a member of the football team who does not belong to DKE shoved her onto a sofa, forced her hands down his pants and aggressively kissed her. Then, she said, he pulled her upstairs by the hand and pushed her against a wall, relenting only after two other people walked up the stairs. She later returned to her Old Campus dorm with a swollen lip.

The woman never reported the incident to Yale. But again her friend and boyfriend corroborated the account, and she provided the News with copies of text messages discussing the swollen lip.

The other students who also spoke to the News without naming their alleged assailants said their experiences with DKE members or at fraternity events, while troubling, never rose to the level of unwanted, penetrative sex.

One woman said that while she was at a DKE party in fall 2016, a brother she knew began lifting women up and trying to kiss them, even as they protested. Eventually, she said, the brother made eye contact with her, lifted her into the air and tried to kiss her.

“Tons of people were yelling at him to stop because I was visibly scared, but he didn’t listen,” she said, adding that she could not remember who the people yelling were. “Then, he put me down and pinned me against the wall and tried to kiss me again. I struggled to get out of his grip, but I couldn’t because he is much taller and heavier than I am. A number of people looked on as this happened, and finally, someone pulled him off me. I haven’t been back to DKE since.”

A third female student described standing toward the side of an off-campus formal with friends last April when a DKE brother suddenly grabbed and began kissing her. The incident was mostly innocuous, she said, but it still shocked her.

A fourth student said she has been groped in the dark at DKE on each of the six occasions when she has gone to the fraternity for a party.

“It often would happen that I would be pushed to the side and someone would start groping me, and I would try to push him away, and it was very hard to push the guy away,” said the woman, who said she doesn’t know the names of the men who groped her. “I remember one time where I was just very, very overwhelmed and then just slid through his arms on the side and then left. And another time, my friend had to literally pull him off me and tell him to stop.”

None of these four women ever reported her experience with DKE brothers or at the DKE house to Yale. The woman who says she was followed home in fall 2014 said that at the time, she did not understand that what had happened might constitute sexual assault.

“As a freshman, I just did not understand that there was a spectrum of sexual assault,” the woman said. “Yale did not provide the toolkit to think about it.”

THEY SAID HE WAS CHARMING

Yale declined to comment on criticism of the University by the female students who did not report their allegations against DKE brothers.

“We do not confirm, deny or discuss the existence of cases before the UWC and ask that the YDN and others respect the confidentiality of the processes, which is important to ensuring fairness for all those involved,” Vice President for Communications Eileen O’Connor said.

Assistant Dean of Student Affairs Melanie Boyd noted that Yale first years have been required to attend six mandatory sessions designed to “help students recognize, prevent and respond to sexual misconduct” since 2012. In these sessions — such as “Health and Sexuality Workshops” led by the Community Health Educators and “Understanding Sexual Assault: The Myth of Miscommunication,” led by the CCEs — students practice the “kind of clear, open sexual communication” that makes for good consensual encounters and learn to identify situations in which “consent may be in question,” Boyd said.

In the 2016–17 academic year, 56 undergraduates contacted Sexual Harassment and Assault Response & Education center, or SHARE, about sexual harassment and sexual assault. The center offers resources for victims of misconduct and guidance on how to pursue disciplinary action against perpetrators.

“At Yale, we have an array of resources available to anyone in need of support and accommodation, regardless of whether or not they choose to file a complaint,” Boyd said. “Over recent years, I’ve been pleased to see more and more people making use of those resources as community awareness has grown.”

Still, those efforts have not entirely removed the social stigma against reporting sexual assault accusations against popular male students.

The four other women who spoke with the News said they were assaulted by the same male student — the one who resigned after the publication of the Business Insider story. In a statement provided by his lawyer, the former DKE brother issued a blanket denial of all the allegations against him in this story.

“While I have not been told the identity of my accuser, nor have I been provided any factual details that would allow me to substantively respond to these anonymous accusations, I absolutely deny that I have ever raped or engaged in nonconsensual intercourse with anyone,” he said in the statement.

Still, the female Yale student who has already spoken about her experience with the News and Business Insider alleges that she was raped by the former brother in April 2017. The four others say he assaulted them during the 2015–16 school year, when they were first years and he was a sophomore.

One of those four said that while her sexual relationship with the former DKE brother began as consensual, it quickly took a turn.

“I decided I did not want to continue and clearly verbalized I no longer wanted to hook up,” the student said. “He didn’t respect my withdrawal of consent and continued to act as though he was entitled to my body and attention.”

In December 2015, she said, she let him into her room on the condition that nothing sexual would occur. Soon, however, he began to massage her, she said. Then, she said, he got on top of her and began penetrating her without her consent.

“He was literally on top of me, and I couldn’t really stop it, and I didn’t know what to say,” she recalled. “He disregarded my pre-established boundaries and coerced me into penetrative sex.”

The incident left her feeling “gross” and “confused,” she said. But in the following months, she recalled, all she heard about him from friends and acquaintances was that he was the “guy you’d want to introduce to your parents” and “who makes a girl feel like a princess.”

A second woman told the News that, in January 2016, during her first year at Yale, she went home with the former DKE brother after a party and slept in his bed with him. When she woke up the next morning, she said, he started having sex with her.

“I had just woken up and was still kind of half asleep, and then it happened, basically without any warning. This wasn’t violent per say, but it was sex blatantly without my permission,” she said. “I was so shocked that I froze and just let it happen, and then I told him to stop, and then I immediately pushed myself away.”

At the party, she had found him “charming,” and the next day friends told her that he was “such a great guy” and that reporting him would turn her into “the freshman who objected to that.”

A week or two later, she said, he sought her out at Toad’s Place and groped her so forcefully that, after she began to fight back, they both lost their balance and fell onto the dance floor.

A third female student recalled going to the former DKE brother’s bedroom in the spring of her first year at Yale after a different Toad’s party. After she told him she did not want to have sex with him and called an Uber to take her home, she said, he became aggressive and would not let her leave, pushing her onto his bed.

“I even went to the bathroom to call my friends and try to get someone to help, but that didn’t work,” she said, because no one was able to come pick her up. “The entire night he had sex with me three or four times as I repeatedly told him to stop and that I wanted to leave. I had to sneak out in the morning when he was sleeping because I was really scared that he wouldn’t listen to me again.”

The fourth student said she had briefly had a casual, consensual sexual relationship with the same former DKE brother during her first year at Yale. But one night in his dorm room in fall 2015, she said, she repeatedly turned down his sexual advances as he pulled her head toward his crotch. After a while, they both fell asleep. But she woke up around 3 a.m., she said, to find him vaginally penetrating her.

“I basically just laughed and said, ‘OK, I just won’t ever see him again,’” she recalled. “And that was that, and then I was talking to friends and someone said, ‘That is the definition of sexual assault.’ I said, ‘No, we had been hooking up for a bit, so it doesn’t count.’”

Later that semester, she told her first-year counselor about the experience, and the counselor filed an informal Title IX complaint against the former DKE brother. First-year counsellors are legally obligated to report to Yale any allegations of sexual misconduct they hear. While an informal complaint can lead to counseling or no-contact agreements between students, only a formal complaint prompts a fact-finding process, a hearing and potential disciplinary action. This option spares women the stress of participating in a formal Title IX investigation while allowing them to bring a perpetrator’s conduct to the University’s attention.

In a statement, the DKE spokesman said the fraternity had no knowledge of the allegations against the former brother until the publication of the Business Insider article.

“The member in question immediately resigned his membership from DKE following the article’s release,” the spokesman said. “Consequently, he no longer has any involvement in our organization.”

The DKE spokesman, a student at Yale, provided statements to the News on the condition that he not be named. During a phone call last Thursday, he asked the News not to publish this story and expressed frustration that, as the fraternity’s spokesman, “I’ve spent way more time close to this shit than I would’ve preferred,” referring to the allegations of sexual misconduct against current and former members of the fraternity.

The female students interviewed for this story have told other women over the years about their negative sexual experiences with the brother in question, long before the Business Insider article came out. Last March, for example, the Yale chapter of the Kappa Alpha Theta sorority prevented the brother from attending its “crush” event after members raised concerns about him on an anonymous feedback form, according to people with knowledge of the party. Such forms — which allow sorority members anonymously to blacklist from parties men who have reputations for sexual assault — are common practice among Yale sororities. The DKE spokesman said he could not confirm whether fraternity members had heard rumors about the former brother. But he said nobody in the fraternity’s leadership knew he had been barred from sorority events or were aware of any other rumors about him until allegations surfaced in Business Insider.

In addition to the student whose first-year counsellor filed the informal Title IX complaint, two of the other women who say the former DKE member assaulted them — including the student who filed a formal complaint last week — told the News they have filed informal complaints against him.

The women who have stopped short of filing formal Title IX complaints against the former DKE brother cited a range of reasons for their decisions.

“Everyone told me he was a ‘great guy,’” said the student who claims she was assaulted by him in the morning. “I didn’t have it in me to bring up what happened, especially to people who knew him.”

The woman who alleges that the former DKE brother had nonconsensual sex with her three to four times in one night said that, after the incident, she went to Yale’s SHARE center to discuss what had happened. But she later heard rumors that Yale does a poor job handling complaints. And friends told her that the former DKE member had assaulted other women without repercussions.

“That really amplified my feeling that even if I did come forward, nothing would happen,” she said. “Since freshman spring, I have definitely thought about it from time to time, but potentially having [a UWC case] drag out and reopen that whole period of time, if Yale was to even do anything, has kept me from formally reporting him.”

The woman whose first-year counsellor filed an informal complaint against the former DKE brother explained that she had already gone through the process of obtaining a no-contact order against a different Yale student who she says assaulted her that year. She did not want to go through the process again. Moreover, she said, her friends advised her against filing a formal Title IX complaint. They told her it would be the word of a “promiscuous freshman girl” against that of a confident older student.

No one would believe her.

“SOUTHERN GENTLEMEN”

DKE brothers live in two houses on Lake Place, one of which serves as a party venue. On weekend nights, students pile into the party house while brothers stand watch on the front porch. John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Road” sometimes plays as partygoers cram together on the crowded, beer-stained dance floor and brothers dressed in red, white and blue or denim congregate around kegs and beer pong tables.

DKE made negative headlines in 2011, when Yale banned the fraternity from campus for five years after pledges chanted, “No means yes! Yes means anal!” in front of the Women’s Center. When the ban ended in 2016, Persichetti, who at the time was the fraternity’s president, told the News that the sanctions “had a positive impact on the culture of our fraternity.”

In 2014, four Yale Law School students wrote a letter to the New Haven Board of Zoning Appeals, protesting the addition of a Chi Psi house on Lake Place, on the grounds that they had been sexually harassed by brothers in DKE and Alpha Delta Phi, which also has a house on the street. Members of both fraternities frequently made “lewd sexual comments and gestures” to neighbors and other women who walked by, the letter said. And on multiple occasions, it continued, fraternity members had shouted sexually explicit comments into the windows of their houses on Lake Place.

Yuni Chang ’18, who has lived on Lake Place for two years, said that when DKE threw parties last semester, brothers used to gather on the porch and shout at her and other female students to join their parties when they walked by. It was ultimately harmless, she said, but it still made her uncomfortable, given the fraternity’s reputation.

“There are definitely drawbacks living near DKE,” said another Yale student who lives on Lake Place but requested anonymity to avoid blowback from the DKE brothers who live near her. “They sometimes all crowd around on the front porch and just watch people as they walk by, and they sometimes yell out comments — ranging from asking us, me and my friends, to join them to drink to typical cat calling. That makes the street feel uncomfortable at times, especially knowing what we know about the sexual harassment and assault that goes on.”

Discomfort with DKE is not limited to the fraternity’s neighbors on Lake Place. In interviews with the News about DKE, nearly 30 FroCos, CCEs and sorority members said DKE has an institutional culture that condones sexual misconduct, noting that the problem goes beyond the “bad apples” who assault women.

Lexi Hopkins ’20, a member of Alpha Phi, said DKE was “clearly” condoning the sexual misconduct in the fraternity until the negative media coverage the fraternity faced in January. Because of how long DKE took to address its problems, Hopkins said, “what was originally the actions of a few members now reflect the organization as a whole.”

On Feb. 9, DKE finalized a set of recommendations designed to foster a safer environment at the chapter. The major reforms include sober monitors and coed bouncers and bartenders at parties, a new fraternity Facebook page with anonymous feedback forms, maximum house occupancy guidelines and improved drinking-water access.

The report — drafted by a working group consisting of six DKE members, including the president and vice president — came about three weeks after Business Insider contacted the Yale chapter about allegations of sexual misconduct by its members, prompting the fraternity to request that the national DKE organization investigate its sexual climate.

Not all students take issue with DKE. One Yale sorority member said that she has never felt unsafe at the fraternity and has close friends who are DKE members, even though she knows people who refuse to go to DKE because of concerns about its sexual climate. One of the women interviewed for this article even noted that she has great friends who are members of the fraternity, and she thinks of her alleged assailant’s actions as indicative of a campuswide problem, rather than a specific issue with DKE. Another of the women interviewed said she does not believe DKE is all to blame for the behavior of the former DKE brother she says coerced her into penetrative sex in December 2015. But, she added, the “fact that I never elect to go [to DKE] speaks for itself.”

Some of DKE’s neighbors on Lake Place said they have had only positive experiences with the fraternity. Chloe Yee ’18, who has lived next door to DKE for two years, said DKE brothers helped carry her and her neighbors’ furniture up their house’s stairs when they first moved in.

DKE is not the only fraternity at Yale whose members have faced accusations of sexual misconduct. Daniel Tenreiro-Braschi ’19 — a former member of LEO, the fraternity that used to be affiliated with Sigma Alpha Epsilon — sued the University in January after he was suspended for two semesters for groping. Last year, a student was suspended from Yale and expelled from Sigma Phi Epsilon after the UWC found him guilty of sexual assault, according to two students who were involved in the decision to expel him from the fraternity.

“The Business Insider article could honestly have been about any fraternity at Yale. All social spaces here have problems,” said Helen Price ’18, the co-founder of United against Sexual Assault at Yale. “Sexual assault at Yale is certainly not confined to DKE. It’s also certainly not confined to fraternities. We need to be thinking about how sexual disrespect is embedded and normalized in our campus culture rather than just having a two-week outcry about one frat or sports team every couple years.”

In the second of two letters sent to the News, a lawyer representing DKE accused the News of compromising an “expectation of integrity and fairness” because “allegations similar to those levied against the two former DKE members” discussed in the Business Insider article have also been leveled against members of other fraternities at Yale.

“To arbitrarily ‘pick and choose’ those facts the YDN desires to print, while ignoring similar actions by those unaffiliated with DKE is evidence, not of fair and unbiased reporting, but rather of a targeted attack, a ‘witch-hunt’ if you will, against one organization, and one alone: DKE,” the letter says. “Any article singularly intended to malign the character of that membership, and lacking a full, honest, open and fair presentation of ALL applicable and related facts and circumstances will not be taken lightly. It would be viewed as a premeditated and willful attempt by the YDN to attack and defame said membership as a whole.”

Still, multiple women interviewed said the fraternities on High Street — which include LEO, Sig Ep and Sigma Nu — are generally more respectful to women than DKE.

Maya Raiford Cohen ’21, a first year in Theta, said there was a “general consensus” when she arrived on campus that women should avoid the fraternity.

“From the couple of times I did go there early last semester, I remember aggressive verbal comments from guys but never anything super physical,” she explained. “As a girl in Theta who goes out a lot, the expectation is more like stick to High Street and you’re good, which honestly I’ve found to be true, although I lowkey hate to say it.”

Two years ago, Sig Nu expelled a brother after multiple concerns about his sexually aggressive behavior came to its attention, including a direct allegation of sexual assault. Price said other organizations should look to Sig Nu “as a model” for handling situations in which a member’s behavior has drawn multiple concerns in the absence of formal complaints.

The woman who says she has been groped each of the six times she has attended events at DKE said she still goes to other fraternities for parties. But she makes sure to steer clear of DKE.

“If you go to other frats, the men don’t grab you,” she said. “Of course they’ll flirt with you, but it’s not in an aggressive way.”

The student who alleges she was grabbed by a DKE brother last April said that during the day the brothers often act like “Southern gentleman.” They hold open doors, they swing dance with women at parties. But at night, she said, their behavior changes.

“I’ve found many of them to be very Southern gentlemanly, and they can be, in the light of day, really charming,” she said. “But when the lights go down, there’s something more sinister: ‘I’ve been polite, now I want things.’”

Britton O’Daly | britton.odaly@yale.edu

No Beef:
A New Haven teen dreamed of dancing and died without reason

Gabriella Borter

photos by Surbhi Bharadwaj

Published on February 4, 2018

At around 8:30 p.m. on the evening of July 16, 2017, 14-year-old Tyrick Keyes walked up the porch steps of his house on Read Street, opened the front door and went inside. He had been out playing basketball for most of the day, but now that it was getting late, he was hungry. His mom, Demethra Telford, liked him to check in. He found her in the kitchen.

“Mommy, what’d you cook?” he asked. The night before, dinner had been a rare treat — baked macaroni and cheese, not the store-bought kind.

That night was hamburger and rice.

“Aww, you know I don’t eat that!” Tyrick said.

“Okay, Tyrick. If you don’t want it, then you aren’t hungry,” said his mom. She waited for a response, but he wasn’t looking at her. She saw the expression on his face and thought, “Something’s wrong.”

Tyrick ran upstairs. Demethra assumed that he was looking for his brother. Whenever something was bothering Tyrick, something he did not want his mom to worry about, he would talk to his brother Silas, who was three years older. She might have followed him, but her left knee was clamping up more and more these days, and moving wasn’t so easy.

Then he was back downstairs. He walked over to stand by the front door, looking out.

“Ty,” Demethra said. He didn’t turn around.

“Ty,” she said again. He never ignored her like this.

“Ty.”

At around 8:50 p.m., he walked straight out the door without looking back.

***

Tyrick was born at Yale New Haven Hospital on Feb. 6, 2003, and he lived his whole life within the city’s 20 square miles. Still, he never lived in the same place for more than two years, moving from neighborhood to neighborhood as his mom tried to find less-dilapidated subsidized housing. Wherever he lived, the routine was more or less the same. He skateboarded, played pickup football and basketball with kids who lived nearby, and played video games when his mom would let him. He made friends easily and did well in school. He also knew he had to watch his back.

“I always tell my kids, ‘When you see someone driving slow with tinted windows, you run, because you don’t know what they’re going to do,’” Demethra told me. We were sitting in the front parlor of her new home in Beaver Hills, an 8-minute drive from her previous home in Newhallville.

Demethra didn’t spare any caution because she knew what could happen in New Haven. In 2017, the city had 61 shootings and 7 homicides. With crime rates lower than bigger cities like Baltimore and Chicago, its high incidence of gun violence is often overshadowed in the national media. Still, as a relatively small and less populated urban center, the Elm City has been counted among the 25 most dangerous cities in America several times in the last few decades, based on data released in the annual FBI Uniform Crime Report.

Not all city inhabitants face the same level of risk. A Yale study published in January found that black residents of New Haven are nearly 6 times more likely to be the victims of gun violence than white residents, and the vast majority of black victims are between the ages of 10 and 25. Gun violence kills an average of 3 children in America every day — over 1,000 per year — nearly 50 percent of whom are black. Every year, children from New Haven are represented in that statistic.

In 2014, 17-year-old Taijhon Washington was shot and killed by an 18-year-old just a quarter mile from Demethra’s home on Read Street. The day after attending Taijohn’s funeral, 16-year-old Torrence Gamble was shot in the head by another teenager who was a member of a local gang. Jacob Craggett, a 15-year-old star football player at Hillhouse High School — which Tyrick eagerly anticipated attending — was murdered in a shooting in August of the same year. In 2015, 16-year-old Jericho Scott was shot in the Fair Haven neighborhood, and more than two years later, the police still have not arrested anyone for his murder.

Tyrick dreamed of getting away from the neighborhoods where he grew up, where friends of friends had been shot and killed. He had given it thought, and he planned to make it out by becoming a professional dancer.

“His thing from when he was a very little boy was ‘Mommy, when I grow up I’m going to be successful. I’m going to help people. I’m going to make it out the ’hood, and I’m getting you out the ’hood with a white picket fence, and I’m going to have all these children,’” Demethra said, smiling at the memory.

***

Tyrick walked into the New Haven anti-violence arts program Ice the Beef at age 12, determined to learn the moves that would catapult him to dance stardom. He had already been practicing, but, according to his friend Tyshade, his moves weren’t “fluid.”

“It wasn’t, like, that bad,” Tyshade said. But Tyshade knew that Tyrick could work on his hip-hop skills at Ice the Beef, so he convinced his friend to come with him to a vacant building in Goffe Street Park one day after school.

Goffe Street Park is in New Haven’s Dixwell neighborhood, less than a mile from Yale University’s campus. Empty liquor bottles and banana peels are strewn on the grass. Black graffiti is sprayed across the building’s brick exterior. It reads, “I ♥ ♫”and “Kiss butt.”

From 3 to 5 p.m., Monday through Friday, a synthesizer beat blasts from the building where Tyshade and 30 other kids from New Haven meet for Ice the Beef rehearsal. Ice the Beef kids range in age from fifth grade to sophomores in college, and they differ in specialty too — some are rappers, some are actors and some come because they want to dance, as Tyrick did. The program aims to get kids excited about the performing arts and, at the same time, to keep them off the streets and out of trouble.

I visited the building on a Wednesday afternoon in October. I waited until the president of Ice the Beef, Chaz Carmon, had finished giving an arriving group of teenage boys fist bumps before I introduced myself. Chaz, 40, is a New Haven native and was, he said, “a big drug trafficker back in the day.” That was before he found God, turned his life around and realized his purpose working with at-risk youth.

Chaz took over Ice the Beef from its founder, Darryl Allick, a New Haven native who was also involved in drug trafficking before his brother was killed in a street shooting in 2011. Darryl started the organization that same year. In its early days, Ice the Beef provided services to help grieving families and offered assistance in paying for burials. But when Darryl asked Chaz to come on board, Chaz had a different idea for what the mission should be.

“He said, ‘Do you want to be president?’” Chaz recalled. “And I said, ‘OK, I’ll be president if we go out of bereavement and go into youth services. Why are we catching them after they die? Let’s do something before they die.’”

On this fall afternoon, a soft-spoken boy named Monty stood outside the building and practiced his emcee introduction for one of the group’s upcoming shows. Inside, there was one main room — a wide-open space with yellowish walls and a linoleum floor. Three girls danced in the middle, thrusting and locking in synchronized moves to a blaring hip-hop track. Two boys stood in the corner, engrossed in a freestyle rap battle. Other kids sat on the floor, taking a break from the action and watching the performances in front of them.

“It’s a walk-in program,” Chaz told me. “So you can also just come in off the street and hang out. You don’t have to have great grades. If you say cuss words, we’re not going to be mad at you, whereas at other programs” — he jerks his thumb over his shoulder — “kicked out. We really try hard not to kick you out of this program.”

Almost all of the kids who go to Ice the Beef are in New Haven’s Youth Stat program, a city initiative that provides academic support, counseling and basic needs to New Haven public school students who are at risk of dropping out. Students recruited for the Youth Stat program are often homeless, have family conflict or are under threat from a local gang. Several Ice the Beef kids were expelled from school, some more than once, before they started coming to the group. At Ice the Beef, they learn not only how to rap but also “the 5 Rs”: rules, responsibility, respect, resolve and results. Lastly, participants work on the anger management skills that give the program its name.

“If you have beef with somebody, it’s like you have a problem with somebody,” Chaz said. “It’s not like we get in a fight and then it’s over. Beef is [when you’ve] got a problem for a while. Icing the beef is stopping the beef. So we try to teach them how to calm down. That’s the key. If you shoot somebody, you’re angry. If you get in a fight, you’re angry. If we teach you how to calm down, that’ll solve half the problems.”

Tyrick hardly needed the anger management lessons, though. He was, Chaz said, the “nicest kid,” always smiling and never needing to be told the same thing twice. He came to the program to learn how to dance, and he did that quickly.

“He started coming to me with new moves, and I’m like, ‘Ay, bro, that’s weavy!’” Tyshade said, laughing. “And then he told me a few moves too.”

Tyshade and Tyrick both watched the famous Les Twins on YouTube — “the best dancers in the world,” if you ask Tyshade — and eventually choreographed and performed a few shows to their music at YMCAs around New Haven. When they weren’t dancing together, the boys would play basketball and football in Goffe Street Park. They had never gone to the same school before, but they were both about to enroll at Hillhouse High School.

“He was so excited,” Tyshade remembered. “He was like, ‘Bro, we’re going to be going to Hillhouse! We’re going to be walking to class together!’”

When he learned that Tyrick had been shot, Chaz canceled the arts program. He couldn’t hold himself together. Still, every kid showed up the next afternoon.

“We cried into each other’s shoulders. The therapist was in here,” Chaz said, shaking his head. “You hear this from leaders in the community, you hear this from the school, you hear this from everybody, but it doesn’t really hit home till it hits home. And then it’s like, ‘Crap, that really f—ing happened.’”

***

Newhallville, the New Haven neighborhood where Tyrick’s family was living in the summer of 2017, has over twice the citywide average of violent crime. Demethra never wanted to live there, but her dependence on the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Housing Choice Voucher Program, known as Section 8, left her with few options besides the Newhallville house on Read Street. Her previous house needed repairs, and the landlord wouldn’t take care of them. Forced to choose between a house that was falling apart and a neighborhood she disliked, Demethra saw no alternative.

“They told me I would lose my Section 8 if I didn’t take it. I didn’t want to move to Read Street at all, but they left me no choice,” she said. “I went to them and I begged them, ‘Please Section 8, let me out.’ I said to them, ‘What is it going to take, me or my children to get killed?’”

Despite several phone calls, messages and a weekday visit to the New Haven Housing Authority, the occupancy specialist who handled Demethra’s case could not be reached for comment.

The house on Read Street where Demethra moved in 2016 is narrow and white. It sits on a row of similar three-story, tired-looking Victorian homes. Many homes in Newhallville, like this one, are set off from the street with barbed wire fences. Some have small porches where residents may sit and look out at the street at all hours of a summer day. Most have bars on their windows. Teenagers race their bikes down the middle of the road, and women pushing strollers squabble outside the corner store. As of 2016, the neighborhood was 86 percent black and 21 percent unemployed.

Just a week before Tyrick was shot, Demethra heard gunshots fired so nearby that she had to duck inside. She called the landlord and told him she needed to move and that she didn’t care that her lease was not up. “He told me to wear a bulletproof vest,” she recalled.

***

When Tyrick left his house on his bike around 8:50 p.m. the night of July 16, Demethra knew she couldn’t catch him. Instead, she turned to her 4-year-old granddaughter Skyler.

“Go catch Uncle Ty!” she said.

“He’s gone!” Skyler said.

From Read Street, it’s only a minute by bike to the corner of Bassett and Newhall streets. Demethra had barely gotten upstairs to look for her knee medication before Jasmine, a friend in the neighborhood, came running to the house to tell her that her son had been shot on that corner. Then she did what any mother would do, knee injury or not — she ran.

When she got to the scene, there were close to 15 people around. One of them, a woman named Missy, had called 911 when she heard gunshots and saw a boy fall. Tyrick was struggling to get up, but Missy tried to urge him to stay down. When Demethra arrived, she saw nobody else. Her attention was only on her child lying next to a barbed wire fence, his blood staining the sidewalk. The police showed up next, and they blocked off the area around Tyrick with tape.

“I was yelling to the police officer because they wouldn’t let me by my son, and I said, ‘Where is the f—ing ambulance? My son’s laying here!’” Demethra said.

At 9:36 p.m., an ambulance arrived on the scene and loaded Tyrick into the back on a stretcher. Demethra was not allowed to ride in the ambulance. Her husband, Tyrick’s stepfather, drove her to the hospital, beating the ambulance there.

***

On a Tuesday morning in October, Demethra and I sat on folding chairs in her front parlor, talking. We were surrounded by framed pictures of Tyrick on shelves, on the coffee table, on every wall. In the corner hung a long pop-art tapestry with his face painted in the center. Next to it, a pair of brand new Air Jordan sneakers sat on display in a glass case.

Demethra’s 17-year-old son Silas stood by the front door, backpack over his shoulders, watching the street intently as he waited for the bus. He made no movement when his mother paused our conversation to weep and collect herself. When the bus pulled up to the front of the house, Demethra stopped talking and went to the door to watch her son walk through their small yard and climb in. Then she picked up her phone to call the school and tell the office that Silas had left, to make sure they were expecting him to arrive.

“I worry a lot. Tyrick knew I worry a lot,” she said. “He’d always walk children home, and I’d be like, … ‘Who’s gonna walk you home, Ty?’ He’d be like, ‘Mommy, I’m okay. Nothing’s going to happen to me.’ I said ‘Baby, you got to be careful.’ But he’d still do it.”

It didn’t matter who it was or what help they needed — Tyrick lived to make himself useful. He raked his neighbors’ yards without pay. He carried moving boxes for Chaz, the president of Ice the Beef. When he walked by the Little Red Hen community garden near his home in the West River neighborhood, 7-year-old Tyrick insisted on helping with the planting even though there was no free garden bed for him to till. Instead, Stacy Spell, a former police detective who had established the garden as a community-building initiative, gave Tyrick a five-gallon bucket. Over the course of several weeks, thanks to Tyrick’s diligent watering, a tomato plant and a pepper plant sprouted from that bucket. Even when Tyrick’s family moved out of the West River neighborhood, he still came back to the garden on Saturdays to eat strawberries and help with weeding.

“He was just one of those kids that was not only for the outside people but for his family,” Demethra said. Then she laughed and admitted that, when he wasn’t helping or doing chores, his silly side got the best of him.

“He was a goofball,” she said. “He gets it from me.”

On days when he was feeling like a rascal, Tyrick walked into his mom’s room without knocking. “I told you to knock on my door little boy!” she’d call out, trying to be stern. But she couldn’t help laughing at him as he shimmied and made funny faces in the reflection of her TV. When Silas joined, the boys would chase their mom through the house. “You know my leg’s messed up!” she protested. When they quickly caught her, she couldn’t get away from the tickle attack. “No, you’re just getting old!” they teased.

Dinner was also a time for jokes. Extended family would come over for special occasions, and, when Tyrick knew there would be more people at the table, he asked his mom to hide the hot sauce on a high shelf. That way, if only he and she knew where it was, he could make sure he got it first.

But at most meals, hot sauce was the furthest thing from his mind. Tyrick would occasionally bring his friends home and ask his mom if they could get something to eat because they were hungry, even when the family barely had enough for themselves.

One time he came home with another question. He asked his mom and stepfather how much jail time he would get for stealing a moped — something a few kids had tried to convince him to do.

“They tell me that I won’t get much time. I’ll just go to juvenile,” he said to his mom. When she pressed him to tell her who was putting him up to stealing, all he said was, “I’m not a snitch.”

“Are you planning on doing it?” Demethra asked.

“No, Mommy, I’m never gonna do that because you’re not going to get me out!” he said.

It was true that Demethra had assured her sons she would not bail them out if they were sent to prison, because they had to learn. She is proud to say that, although she has two older sons who have spent time behind bars, she raised her children the way she was raised: “the good way.”

“I was really hard on my kids,” she said. “I had a soft point too, but I was really hard. I was like this: ‘If you sell drugs, if you put your hands on a weapon, if you do anything bad, you’re out of my house. I will call the police, and you won’t come back here at all. And if you take anything, I’m still going to call the police.’ And my kids knew I was very serious.”

No matter how many times Demethra asked Tyrick who was trying to make him steal the moped, he refused to tell her because he thought she would call the police. She sat him down at the kitchen table and looked at him.

“Baby, you’ll get time,” she said. “Don’t believe what other people are telling you. You’ll get time.”

***

Unlike many of his peers, Tyrick never got in trouble with the law. The only time he came close was late last spring, a couple of months before he was shot.

Tyrick and Silas were leaving Goffe Street Park after Ice the Beef, around 5 p.m. Demethra was expecting the boys home shortly after, but they never arrived. Instead, she got a call from the police department saying that her sons had been arrested.

Demethra hung up the phone and walked with her nephew Elijah to the police car on Goodyear Street to pick up Silas and Tyrick, furious. She demanded to know why her sons had been stopped, and she said the police told her they had put the boys in the car because there had been a shooting in the area and Tyrick and Silas fit the description of the suspects.

“That don’t give you the right to stop them and chase them down and put out a dog on them,” Demethra said to me, fuming. “No it don’t.”

The New Haven Police Department does not release arrest records for minors and declined to comment.

When Demethra came to pick up her sons, she recalled, the officers apologized and told her they were good kids.

But after that day, Tyrick was scared. He didn’t trust the police — a lack of faith that had been ingrained in him as a young black boy growing up in New Haven. He heard it from his friends, from the older kids, even from adults in the community: “No snitching.” Sometimes, as in the cases of Taijohn Washington and Jericho Scott, whom the police said were targeted after reporting information on crimes, it costs you your life.

Stacy Spell, the retired detective who knew Tyrick through the Little Red Hen garden, sees distrust in community policing as a growing problem. Stacy — or “Big Stace,” as he prefers — is a neighborhood man, through and through. He ambles down the streets of New Haven’s West River neighborhood, his dreadlock ponytail swinging with every step, bellowing out a greeting to everyone he passes.

This, to Stacy, is the essence of community policing — officers engaging with citizens on- and off-duty.

“If you stand on a corner long enough, somebody’s going to come over and talk to you,” he said. “It don’t have to be about anything crucial. It’s in talking to them that you create those relationships.”

As a veteran of the system, it pains Stacy to see young officers miss opportunities to get to know their assigned neighborhood and make themselves easily approachable. If no one feels comfortable talking to the police, people who commit crimes get a free pass. It’s the absence of those officer–citizen relationships that creates distrust, and distrust, Stacy believes, is to blame for the fact that no person has been arrested for Tyrick’s murder.

“Make no mistake, someone saw something,” Stacy said, shaking a finger. “It hurts me that no one has come forward. It bothers me that you’re a father, you’re a mother, you’re an aunt, you’re somebody’s sister, and you saw this happen, and you’re not saying anything.”

***

After Tyrick arrived at Yale New Haven hospital on the night of July 16, Demethra spent the next four days by her son’s bedside, watching him suffer. She said the doctors told her that his heart had stopped twice at the scene of the crime, but he was still fighting.

On the fourth day, the fight was over. Demethra realized she had to pull the plug. But before she did, she made him a promise: She would not rest until she got justice for him.

Nearly seven months later, the New Haven Police Department’s detective unit is still pursuing an active investigation into Tyrick’s murder. The police say it appears that Tyrick was targeted. Witness reports say that the shooter was in a white vehicle, and some say the person was wearing a black face mask. No one has called in any suspects.

***

Demethra still gets in her car every day and drives across New Haven County to hang up flyers for the $50,000 reward that the governor has offered for information on her son’s murderer. On Thanksgiving and Christmas, she made him a plate of food and propped up his picture on the chair where he should have been sitting. She calls the police department every few days, and sometimes they pick up, but they don’t tell her much. Every night she sits among the belongings and photos of her son in the front parlor, wishes him goodnight and prays to God that the detectives get a written statement or a phone call from someone who knows what happened that night.

“Someone was there. Someone saw it,” she said. “They got to look at it as, what if it were their child?”

On her bookshelf, next to a framed picture of Tyrick at his eighth-grade graduation, is a photo of a patch of sidewalk next to a barbed wire fence.

“There’s his blood,” she said, pointing to a few brown splotches on the cement. “If they ever catch his killer, I want to bring these things up and show them what they did to my son.”

She gazed up at the photo of Tyrick in his graduation cap, smiling with his diploma in hand.

“I’m not going to let my son be another cold case, one they just put up on the shelf.”

Under the Wing

Story by Will Reid

Lead photo by Robbie Short

Published on December 11, 2017

On the evening of Oct. 18, 2017, University President Peter Salovey rose to address a gathering of Yale alumni at an event in Seattle. About a hundred people were settled into the small auditorium’s staggered seating. Behind the stage, the city skyline — with its famed Space Needle — filled the projector screen. Just as Salovey began his speech, a woman leapt onto the stage and faced the audience at large: “Excuse me everyone, can I have your attention please?”

A prominent public figure, an interjecting protester, an imposing security guard hovering in the wings — perhaps more important than the actors on the stage was the protester’s accomplice in the audience, who was recording a video destined for YouTube.

In the video, activist Marlene Blanco brandishes a sign that droops and folds as she paces the stage. “President Salovey: Stop cruel sparrow experiments,” it reads. Below the message, the name of the group that had dispatched her to Seattle is written in cursive: People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

Since last May, the Norfolk-based nonprofit has mounted a sustained campaign online and in person against a Yale postdoctoral researcher named Christine Lattin. In her work, Lattin examines how wild house sparrows respond to stress. She induces this stress by placing birds in cloth bags, rattling their cages and adding small amounts of crude oil to their millet.

PETA considers the research torture and the researcher, who has euthanized 250 birds since 2008, a killer. While PETA’s campaign targets her methods not Lattin herself, the group’s tactics have a very personal edge. PETA’s online posts identify her by name, which has enabled internet users to flood Lattin’s email, Facebook and Twitter inboxes with hate mail. PETA has also revealed her home address: of their six protests, one was staged outside her New Haven condo, where she lives with her husband and 20-month-old son.

Meanwhile, the University has defended Lattin. Her methods meet all the guidelines on bird research set by Yale’s Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee and by the Ornithological Council.

Back on stage, Salovey spoke dryly into the microphone, asking Blanco to leave. But she persisted, yelling, “Shame on Yale! Stop killing birds! Shame on Yale!”

The crowd, at first quiet, grew agitated. “Begone!” one alumnus shouted, with a touch of melodrama fitting for the occasion.

“You’re going to have to carry me out!” Blanco yelled back.

A few minutes of pacing later, Blanco left of her own accord; security had called the police, and Blanco decided not to risk arrest. It was clear as she exited the stage that her act was over.

Lattin watches for birds in East Rock Park on Saturday, Nov. 20. (Robbie Short)

***

On a crisp day in November, Lattin, dressed in jeans and a dark cardigan, stepped off a shuttle onto the curb outside the Yale School of Medicine. As we walked toward her lab along the sun-dappled sidewalk, her demeanor scarcely showed the six months of harassment she had endured.

Lattin came to Yale in 2014 after receiving her doctorate from Tufts University. She came to Yale for access to world-class equipment: PET scanners, doughnut-shaped instruments that use particles of antimatter to peer inside the organs of a still-living body. Yale has one of the best PET labs in the world, according to Richard Carson, director of the University’s PET Center and Lattin’s boss. The scanners enable researchers to quantify everything from organ function to brain density by examining how organic molecules, such as sugars or hormones, are concentrated in the various parts of the body. The scanning process is complex and expensive, not least because it requires researchers to have a stock of radioactive molecules on hand to inject into their subjects.

The School of Medicine is a fitting home for such a complex operation. Clinicians use PET scanners to find cancerous tumors; medical researchers use them to make sure new drugs hit their target. Lattin wanted to use them to study how different hormone levels in the brain influence bird behavior.

“It’s kind of amazing to me that they let me put feral sparrows in their million-dollar scanner,” she said. “Not everyone would be as open to doing this work.”

Carson said they had never scanned a bird before. About 25 percent of PET Center scans involve animals, but most of these examine more typical research subjects, such as mice or chimpanzees. Lattin had to develop new techniques to use the scanners on sparrows. She worked with engineers at Yale’s Center for Engineering, Innovation and Design to build a specialized plastic gurney for the birds that holds their bodies steady while they lay anesthetized in the scanner. And she’s had to develop a new method for injecting the radioactive tracer into the sparrows’ tiny bodies.

“Now the birds are being scanned the same way people are being scanned,” said Carson.

The research harks back to Lattin’s time before academia, when she was on staff at animal shelters and other conservation centers. Her work has already contributed to scientific discourse, racking up a total 384 citations, according to Google Scholar. Her crude oil study has been cited by researchers working with dolphins, sea turtles and other species exposed to the 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Lattin’s study found that even tiny amounts of crude oil induced the birds’ stress response. Even if they appeared normal, the birds’ hormones revealed internal distress. In other words, stress can be hard to detect — in birds being researched or in a researcher herself.

Computer tomography (CT) scans provide a powerful tool, Lattin says, for her research. (Robbie Short)

***

In 1980, PETA began with five members and a philosophy. Since then, its numbers have grown to over 6.5 million — a million and a half more than the National Rifle Association. Inspired by Peter Singer’s manifesto of the modern animal rights movement, its founders sparked a revolution. They believe that the mistreatment of animals is morally equivalent to the mistreatment of any human group. “Animals are not ours to eat, wear, experiment on, use for entertainment or abuse in any other way,” the PETA slogan goes.

Among the general public, PETA is perhaps best known for its provocative advertisements, which advocate for adoption of a vegan lifestyle. Provocative puts it lightly: In a recent Thanksgiving-themed ad, a family happily slices into a roasted human child, dressed like a turkey. But PETA’s efforts at persuasion don’t stop with consumer choice. Among other watchdog agencies, PETA has a department devoted to investigating and lobbying against the use of animals in academic and commercial research.

PETA’s lab investigators first looked into Lattin’s work last year, after an article published in the Yale Engineering magazine detailed her collaboration with the CEID.

A few things stood out immediately, said PETA’s chief of laboratory case management Alka Chandna. Lattin’s abstracts made no mention of the potential human benefit of her research. Chandna and her colleagues doubted that Lattin’s discoveries in wild sparrows could be applied to other bird species — let alone humans.

“Right away, we can say, ‘She’s harming animals and there’s no human benefit,’” Chandna said.

Ingrid Taylor, a veterinarian on staff at PETA, pored over Lattin’s articles, searching for evidence of cruelty in the experiments she conducted at Yale and Tufts. For Taylor, the worst part was that these were not accidents that occurred during the course of research — they were part of the research itself. Lattin’s crimes were premeditated.

In May 2017, PETA, evidence in hand, sprang into action. It filed complaints with the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the district attorney of Middlesex County, Massachusetts, where Tufts is located. (Most states, including Connecticut, exempt research animals from their cruelty laws, but Massachusetts does not.) Then, the campaign for popular opinion began.

“Right from our inception we’ve known that media is critical to our work,” said Chandna. Social media has only made it easier to amplify their message. It’s a change for Chandna, who’s been involved with animal rights work since the 1980s. It used to be that, as an undergraduate, she would spend $15 to order VHS tapes from PETA through the mail. Now, videos surface right in your news feed.

One such video begins with a photo of Lattin holding the blue plastic device that keeps the sparrows in place while they are in the scanner. She’s grinning directly into camera. “This woman is torturing songbirds,” reads the superimposed text. The video has over 2 million views on Facebook and about 9,000 “angry” reactions.

“You better believe that we’re sponsoring advertisements on Facebook,” Chandna said. “You better believe that whenever there’s an opportunity to get this video footage in front of people, we’re doing that.”

PETA has used other channels as well, sending letters to the Yale President’s Office and appealing to alumni for support. A recent alumna, Hanh Nguyen ’17, first heard about Lattin’s research when she started working for PETA the summer after graduation. She wasn’t personally involved with the campaign until October, when she joined a group of demonstrators outside a Yale Corporation meeting at Woodbridge Hall. That month, she sent a letter to alumni organizations, urging them to express their disapproval of the experiments.

Lattin stands next to her PET scanner. (Robbie Short)

After the first online posts against her in May, Lattin’s inbox started filling up with messages from unfamiliar addresses. Some described her research in a way she didn’t recognize. “Unsuspecting birds who have been lured to feeders and trapped or netted are being systematically tormented to induce stress and fear,” read one. Others addressed Lattin directly: “SHAME ON YOU” and “STOP TORTURING BIRDS YOU SICK FUCK!” Notably, a majority of messages criticized the alleged purposelessness of Lattin’s work.

At first, Lattin thought it would blow over. Things weren’t too bad for Lattin — the controversy didn’t even show up on the first page of Google results for her name. Some colleagues advised her to keep her head down. This type of incident hadn’t happened at Yale in about a decade. The last target — Marina Picciotto, a neuroscientist studying addiction — remained at Yale.

A turning point came when PETA protesters demonstrated outside a conference in Long Beach, California, where Lattin was presenting. Lattin described the experience of having protesters shout her name while she spoke to her colleagues as “incredibly traumatic.”

The situation worsened. Lattin could tell by spikes in harassment whenever PETA uploaded a new post. Some of the messages she received were so threatening she shared them with the New Haven Police Department. She also keeps a file on her computer in case something happens to her, so she can have evidence to provide the FBI.

Chandna thinks it’s regrettable that Lattin has felt threatened, but she emphasized how PETA’s communications have been polite. “Clearly, our intention is never to have people be harassed,” she said. “It is never our intention to stir up the masses.”

As for the protests PETA has organized, Chandna doesn’t see them as harassment. Rather, she sees the tactics against Lattin as similar to those deployed by any other campaign for social justice.

“I don’t even think of home demonstrations as being harassing,” she said. “And I like to remind people that the body count here, the harassment here, has been done by Christine Lattin. There are more than 250 birds that have been captured from birdfeeders.”

Taking a step back, for Chandna, Lattin’s work represents one battle in a larger “war on animals” being waged by researchers across the country — against which PETA’s prepared to fight back.

“If you’re going to take Vienna, take Vienna.’” Chandna said. “That’s PETA’s modus operandus [sic]. We’re in it to win it.”

Lattin looks at her scans from the other side of a glass panel in her lab. (Robbie Short)

***

When Lattin needs more sparrows, she gathers a mix of potter traps and mist nets and goes herself to catch them. The sparrows she finds are an invasive species, introduced to North American cities in the 1850s as a solution for urban pests and a salve for homesick European immigrants. They’ve since spread across the whole continent, which is one reason Lattin felt comfortable using them in research — she knew they weren’t going extinct anytime soon.

Lattin acquired her bird-handling skills as a young science educator at the Glen Helen Raptor Center, near Springfield, Ohio. The center is part nature preserve, part animal shelter for the area’s birds of prey. Primarily, Lattin led grade-school children on hikes and taught them about local bird populations. Toward the end of her time, she became an assistant to the veterinarian on staff. Sometimes, she said, birds would be brought in who could not be saved. While the vet euthanized them with a syringe, Lattin held their bodies still.

“That was really hard for me,” she recalled, taking a long pause. “It was pretty sad. But you know, definitely better than … starving to death is definitely a worse way to go.”

In her current research, Lattin prides herself on her ability to handle birds deftly, injecting them with radiotracer and taking blood samples. By doing things smoothly, she minimizes the stress birds otherwise would have felt from having someone reach into their cage or pull them out of a net.

Enjoying the work at raptor shelter and subsequent nature preserves, Lattin moved to Eastern Kentucky to study birds full time. To obtain her degree, she chose a topic not far from her undergraduate work in linguistics: analyzing the songs of the blue grosbeak, a seedeater common to the southern United States. Male grosbeaks sing to impress potential mates and, like human speech, their songs are made up of a complex line of syllables strung together by the singer. And like some humans, when male grosbeaks get worked up, they blow a gasket, launching into a tirade of syllables several times longer than a typical song.

Lattin wanted to capture these tunes in the wild, so she packed up her recording equipment and drove to where most humans stayed clear — a local chemical weapons depot. The 14,000 acres of uninhabited land had become a haven for wildlife, favored among local hunters, and the perfect spot to record birdsongs on a spring morning. Lattin got out of her car and started unpacking her equipment. Immediately, she noticed something was off. It was April, peak breeding season. The hills should have been alive with the sound of birdsong. Why was it so quiet?

The answer, it turned out, was weather: A harsh late May frost had shocked the local ecosystem, halting flowers at the bud, hardening the ground and scattering the insects. Without grasshoppers to eat or seeds to chew on, there was no sense trying to attract a mate. “Of course, I was like, ‘Oh my god, what am I going to do?’” recalled Lattin. “I’m trying to do this research project on song and the birds aren’t singing. But for them, it made sense.”

The frost was a stressor, a threat in the birds’ environment that influenced their behavior — like a lion on the savannah or the loss of control from captivity. While eventually grosbeaks returned to the area, the spring silence alerted Lattin to stress as a phenomenon worth studying further. And so her research began.

The container in which the birds rest while in the scanner. A bird's head sits in the white cylinder, which delivers anesthesia. (Robbie Short)

***

“It is amazing that they chose Christine,” Carson said. Given that a lot of animal research is done at Yale, Carson and his colleagues struggle to rationalize PETA’s unilateral focus on Lattin. “Whether that’s because they think more people will care about birds than care about mice and rats,” Carson said, “I don’t know.”

Lattin has her own theories, but mostly she feels vilified unfairly. She’d deliberately switched to PET scanning because the procedure was less invasive. In the future, she hopes to be able to release caught sparrows back into the wild with tiny transmitters so as to track and, later, recapture them. Not only would that be better for the birds, it would be better for the research.

It would feel better for Lattin too. She’s never liked killing the birds, but legally, that’s the requirement: her scientific
collector’s permit, issued by the Connecticut Department of Energy & Environmental Protection, doesn’t permit her to release captured birds back into the wild. The department has an interest in reducing sparrow populations. They’re invasive, and they compete for nest space with local species like bluebirds, whose numbers have declined in recent decades. The permit isn’t something Lattin likes to talk about publicly because she fears it will sound like she isn’t taking responsibility for her work.

PETA has repeatedly argued that Lattin should stop using animals altogether and switch to modern methods, like computational modeling. This perspective misapprehends the state of alternate methods, Lattin said. It’s hard for her to think of something more modern than PET scans. And without animal research, she said, “all scientific discovery would come to a screeching halt.”

Where Lattin prepares the birds to be scanned. (Robbie Short)

Throughout the controversy, the Yale STEM community has come to Lattin’s defense. Graduate students in biology and immunology have written op-eds in her defense, and in October, an undergraduate chemistry and molecular, cellular and developmental biology major circulated a letter of support. One hundred and twenty people have signed.

Lattin’s case has garnered attention from outside Yale as well. Science magazine and the New Haven Register both covered the story. Other concerned researchers, like Kevin Folta at the University of Florida, have sought to protect her reputation. Folta, who has faced protests himself for research on genetically modified organisms, wrote a paean to Lattin on his blog and hosted her on his podcast. Folta believes she is being targeted because, as a young female scientist without tenure, she is vulnerable.

But perhaps the most vigorous defender of the research has been Lattin herself. She has replied to PETA’s claims on Twitter, rewritten her personal website to make it more accessible and made an effort to speak to journalists interested in her case. So far, that seems to have helped — after she started to speak out, the harassment declined.

“A few people early on said, ‘Oh well, keep your head down and it’ll blow over,’” Lattin said. “I kind of think those people are wrong. If you don’t speak up for yourself, you don’t make it easy for people to rally around you.”

***

Though many have flocked to Lattin’s defense, PETA remains undeterred. It will continue its campaign; Lattin will continue her research, though her current focus is elsewhere. This semester, she is teaching the undergraduate class “Comparative Physiology” for the Ecology & Evolutionary Biology Department. And she’s searching for a professorship — somewhere she can run her own lab.

Although PETA’s aim has been to stop Lattin’s research, the experience has only hardened her resolve. PETA’s accusations have not undercut her belief that the work she does is important, that the questions she’s asking need answers and that, without plausible alternatives, work that kills sparrows is justified.

PETA emphasizes that Lattin’s research has no direct application; she’s not working on a new drug or developing a new conservation method. Lattin and her supporters argue scientific inquiry doesn’t work that way. Sometimes research directly solves a problem or answers a question, sometimes opening up space for more.

PETA argues the animals aren’t ours, for research or otherwise. Chandna said the group only approves of animal research that meets the same standards as human trials. Latin says she’s as humane as possible.

“I’m good at this work. And I try to do it in a really thoughtful and respectful way, and be ethical in everything that I do,” she said. “Who do I want to do this research? I want it to be people like me.”

For PETA, Lattin’s research on birds is yet another piece of evidence in their larger case against animal research. For Lattin, that research is her life’s work.

There’s one point both sides can agree on: justified ends and justified means.

Lattin peers down the tunnel in her scanner. (Robbie Short)

Yale-Harvard 2017:
Scenes from The Game

Lead photo by Surbhi Bharadwaj

Published on November 19, 2017

In front of a packed house at the Yale Bowl, the Yale football team secured its first outright Ivy League title since 1980. The Bulldogs defeated Harvard 24–3 in the 134th playing of The Game.

Linebacker Foye Oluokun ’18 left it all on the field in his final collegiate game. (Surbhi Bharadwaj)

The 134th rendition of The Game was the first on the sideline for Handsome Dan XVIII. (Surbhi Bharadwaj)

Yale had not defeated Harvard at the Yale Bowl since 1999. (Surbhi Bharadwaj)

Yalies were keen to remind Harvard students that class awaited them back in Cambridge. (Kristina Kim)

Quarterback Kurt Rawlings ’20 responded to a second-quarter interception with a touchdown pass on the next Yale possession. (Surbhi Bharadwaj)

Wide receiver J.P. Shohfi ’20 put Yale on the scoreboard in the second quarter with a reception in the back corner of the endzone. (Kristina Kim)

Less than a minute after taking the lead, the Bulldogs went ahead by 11 points with a scoop-and-score by cornerback Malcolm Dixon ’20. (Kristina Kim)

Offensive lineman Jon Bezney ’18 missed all of 2016 with a knee injury, but anchored an Eli line that dominated in the trenches on Saturday. (Surbhi Bharadwaj)

Defensive lineman J. Hunter Roman ’19 grabbed one of four takeaways for a stout Eli defense against Harvard. (Surbhi Bharadwaj)

Kicker Alex Galland ’19 put Yale up 17–3 going into halftime with a 25-yard field goal. (Kristina Kim)

The Eli faithful packed the stands on Saturday. (Kristina Kim)

Running back Zane Dudek ’21 concluded his rookie season averaging 7.1 yards per carry. (Kristina Kim)

Saybrook students were front and center in the Yale student section for their annual strip. (Kristina Kim)

In the final seconds of The Game, the Elis could sense the magnitude of the historic win. (Surbhi Bharadwaj)

(Surbhi Bharadwaj)

(Kristina Kim)

The Game 2017

Almost every November since 1875, the Harvard and Yale football teams have faced off in an epic rivalry as old as college sports itself. Use the links below to browse the News’ coverage.

Welcome to the 134th rendition of The Game.

COVERAGE

Team 145 wins The Game, outright Ivy title

For the second straight year, the Yale football team’s season ended with a sea of blue storming the field. But the 134th playing of The Game was still unlike any in recent memory for the Bulldogs. With an emphatic 24–3 victory over Harvard, Yale secured its first outright Ivy League in 37 years.

Scenes from The Game

Team 145 seeks outright championship

Quarterback Kurt Rawlings ’20 remembers it well. Last season’s dramatic 21–14 upset of Harvard snapped a nine-year losing streak to Yale’s centuries-old archrival, an eternity for a storied football program. But rather than pure euphoria, ecstasy or elation, the sophomore signal-caller recalled a sense of ambivalence.

Keys to The Game

With at least a share of the Ivy League championship guaranteed, the Yale football team will turn its attention to reaching two more milestones with a victory over Harvard in the 134th edition of The Game. The Bulldogs (8–1, 5–1 Ivy) will look to defeat the Crimson (5–4, 3–3) in consecutive seasons for the first time since 2000 and earn Yale’s first outright conference title since 1980. But for Team 145 to finish its 2017 campaign on a high note, the Elis will need to rely on their powerful run game, contain Justice Shelton-Mosley and be wary of trick plays.

BY THE NUMBERS: Ivy title race hits final week

For the first time in many years, the Yale football team will take the field for the Harvard-Yale game not only as the favorite, but also as Ivy League champions. The Yale Undergraduate Sports Analytics Group Football Model currently predicts Yale as an 11-point favorite over Harvard, corresponding to a 73 percent chance of winning The Game.

A game unlike any other

“Gentlemen, you are about to play football against Harvard. Never again may you do something so important.” The 1923 Bulldogs took head coach Tad Jones’ pre-game speech to heart, blanking Harvard 13–0 to cap off an undefeated season, in the most anticipated athletic event of the year, the mecca of the sport the two schools had nurtured from infancy.

The Harvard-Yale rivalry stretches back beyond the first time the two schools met on the gridiron, to an 1852 crew race, the first intercollegiate athletic competition. One hundred sixty five years later, the two schools maintain the pre-eminent rivalry in collegiate athletics. In that span, both Yale and Harvard have played a crucial role in founding and developing college athletics. Yale takes the credit for the first collegiate rowing club, the four-point crouch for sprinters, the first cheerleaders, starting college hockey and the first 5-on-5 basketball game. Harvard receives plaudits for introducing masks for fencers and baseball catchers, winning the first modern Olympic gold medal, starting field hockey in America and playing the first college soccer game. However, despite all that varied athletic history, the annual football game has attained a special place in arbitrating the fierce rivalry between the schools.

Dudek looks to cap off stellar first-year campaign

Just one game into his college football career, running back Zane Dudek ’21 found himself making headlines with his trademark blend of elusive and electric running. In his Yale debut against Lehigh, the halfback breached the goal line twice on just a measly nine carries, but that was all he needed to amass a whopping 131 yards on the ground.

Harvard’s season in review

Yale’s season in review

Yale versus Harvard: Fall 2017

See how Yale compared to Harvard in the other fall season matchups this year.

Position breakdown

Comparing Yale and Harvard football teams, unit by unit.

Bulldogs embrace team culture

In the wake of Yale’s 35–31 win over Princeton, head coach Tony Reno credited the team’s desire to play to its standards as the impetus behind the comeback victory, considering the Bulldogs once trailed 24–7.

It’s the reason why he gave his team a C-grade following its 56–28 thrashing of Lehigh. It’s the reason why running back Deshawn Salter ’18 answered a 57-yard Cornell touchdown with an 82-yard scoring scamper of his own one play later. It’s the reason why he sees playing Brown (2–7, 0–6 Ivy) as equally important to a date with Dartmouth (7–2, 4–2). But most importantly, it’s the reason why the Elis are on the cusp of winning their first outright Ivy League championship since 1980 when they host Harvard this Saturday.

SWEEDLER: This one matters

First of all — and I feel silly writing this in the first place, because I think most of you know it already — allow me to dispel the notion that tomorrow’s game does not matter.

SENIOR COLUMN: Team 145

Committing to play Yale football was the best decision I have ever made. When I walked on campus for summer workouts, I was a lost freshman who was still trying to find his way. I didn’t know I was about to embark on a life-changing journey and meet people who would affect my life forever.

SENIOR COLUMN: 13 years

After 13 years, my journey with football is coming to an end. Nov 18th is my last stop. I’ve been playing this game for more than 60 percent of my life, and I can genuinely say there aren’t many things I know better than football. Football is a part of who I am and has been a part of my daily ritual for most days these past 13 years. Whether it be practice, film, working out, rehab or watching the NFL on Sunday, football is a sport of true passion and dedication.

YALE: Tomorrow is unique

While preparing for the Sports Desk’s Yale-Harvard piece, I did what any scholarly columnist ought to do: scoured the web for disparaging Harvard news with which to fill my column. And because every headline was negative, I discovered and prepared to deploy news of the Harvard Institute of Politics granting boy-wiz Sean Spicer a fellowship in the same year that it granted Chelsea Manning one — before buckling under pressure and revoking the latter’s. I read up on how, once again, Harvard’s endowment growth was a lot like the Roman Empire’s: quite impressive before it wasn’t. I was all set to make snide remarks about how Harvard will win a whopping zero fall Ivy League championships.

HARVARD: Once in a decade

It took 10 years for Yale to beat Harvard once. A single time. Winning can be hard, apparently, but beating the Crimson took the Bulldogs longer than it took the U.S. to build the first continental railroad or Michelangelo to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling or the United Arab Emirates to finish the construction of the Burj Khalifa.

God & the Left at Yale

Story by Chris Hays

Lead photograph by Robbie Short

Published on November 12, 2017

The Rev. Robert Beloin sits against the marble wall of the Abraham A. Ribicoff Federal Courthouse in Hartford. Next to him, a line of men and women in suits, tie-dye shirts and clerical attire wraps across the front of the building, blocking the doors. The St. Thomas More priest’s own white collar peeks out from under a Yale-emblazoned vest.

It’s 8 a.m. on Monday, Sept. 25. The flagstones are still damp from the previous evening’s rain. Beloin, his fellow priest the Rev. Karl Davis, Yale history professor Jennifer Klein and 33 other protesters have gathered to support Franklin and Giaconda Ramos, both scheduled for deportation on the 29th. The Ramoses are at their jobs — it is the start of a workday for them, in some ways just like any other workday of the 24 years they have lived, paid taxes and raised a family in the United States.

The Ramoses’ two college-aged sons are there. At moments, the protesters lock arms, resting a 20-foot orange banner that reads “ICE Stop Your Ethnic Cleansing” against their knees. In front of them, a crowd of 200 supporters chants, “No borders, no nations. Stop the deportation,” and “If you don’t let us dream, we won’t let you sleep.”

“We had very clear instructions,” Beloin remembered about his arrest. “Do not resist, do not be dead weight, don’t be carried to the van.”

St. Thomas More graduate affiliate Catherine Rodriguez DRA ’18 alerted Beloin to the protest. “Pope Francis is saying, ‘Go to the periphery and accompany people,’” Beloin said. “Immigration is a way to go to the edges.”

In the days after the demonstration, a New York immigration judge reopened the Ramoses’ case, giving them a temporary stay of deportation. Though a federal judge issued an order of removal for the couple in 2005, immigration officials did not act on the ruling until Trump-era enforcement protocol took effect. “The tone of anger and hatred and ‘us against them’ is really taking a toll on the moral fiber of the country,” Beloin said.

(Robbie Short)

The St. Thomas More priests’ intervention places them among an emerging community of Yale activists called by their religious convictions to take progressive action. Organizations like the Yale Black Seminarians, the Muslim Students Association and the Chaplain’s Office are working to promote social justice in the Trump era. Though religion is often overshadowed by politics at a largely secular institution like Yale, a recent surge in faith-based political activism revealed the complex — and storied — relationship between theology and liberal activism on campus.

For Beloin, these ideas find expression through prayer: at the pulpit, in front of the courthouse and in his holding cell during his daylong stay in jail.

When the protesters arrived at the correctional facility at around 11 a.m., they were each fingerprinted and asked to turn in their possessions. Beloin handed over his wallet, phone, keys and, finally, the clerical collar from around his neck.

On the national stage, conservative religious activism has long eclipsed its liberal counterpart in American politics and media. White evangelical Christian voters have been the Republican Party’s base since President Richard Nixon’s term in office. Although there are significant political disagreements among different right-leaning Christian communities, Christians overwhelmingly vote Republican. In the 2016 presidential election, Christians voted for Trump by a margin of 15 percent, and evangelicals favored Trump by a margin of 64 percent, according to a Pew poll. Yet, as Latino Catholic and Arab Muslim communities come under threat of immigration restrictions and political vilification, the religious left is garnering grassroots support.

The Hartford rally was one of a series of progressive political actions taken by religious leaders across the country in past months. Just three weeks after Trump’s election, the Rev. William J. Barber II led an 80,000-person “Moral March” in Raleigh, North Carolina, mobilizing a national network of interfaith leaders and earning the title of the “strongest contender for [Martin Luther King Jr.]’s mantel” from many supporters, according to The New York Times. In protest of a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, faith leaders linked arms and marched silently through the city.

Just a few weeks later, on the Aug. 28 anniversary of the March on Washington, the Rev. Al Sharpton led the multifaith One Thousand Ministers March for Justice rally along the path of the 1963 march. Wearing clerical collars, yarmulkes and vestments, the demonstrators protested Trump’s racial politics in the wake of the violence in Charlottesville.

Yale has seen a parallel increase in liberal religious activism in recent times, but this movement is not without precedent. Progressive icon and Yale Chaplain William Sloane Coffin Jr. ’49 DIV ’56 leveraged his religious authority on campus to promote anti–Vietnam War and civil rights causes. Though the student body may no longer recognize his name, Coffin’s influence persists.

(Robbie Short)

Coffin’s Pulpit

On Oct. 2, 1967, Coffin stepped up to the lectern at an anti-war press conference in New York City. Yale’s Battell Chapel, he announced, would be “a sanctuary from police action for any Yale student conscientiously resisting the draft.” Following the speech, nearly 300 draft resisters burned or turned in their draft cards to Coffin in an act of collective civil disobedience. A New York Times article about the announcement ran under the headline, “War Foes Are Promised Churches as Sanctuary.” A Yale Alumni Magazine article later observed that Coffin’s Oct. 2 address cemented Yale as the center of the draft resistance movement in New England.

Yale faced an onslaught of incensed calls from alumni even as Yale President Kingman Brewster ’41 denounced Coffin’s speech. Brewster reminded Coffin that Battell was under the authority of the administration, not the chaplaincy; the chapel was not his to give away.

By age 40, Coffin had been arrested three times, including one instance in which he was arrested while leading a Freedom Ride to protest segregation in Alabama. When the New Haven trial of Black Panther Party co-founder Bobby Seale brought thousands to the city, Coffin led a student–faculty committee tasked with keeping the protests nonviolent. Though he twice graced the cover of Time magazine and never faded from the national public consciousness, Coffin was most visible on campus arguing with students, as he tirelessly sought to change minds one at a time.

Coffin’s friend and former University Secretary Henry “Sam” Chauncey Jr. ’57 laughed as he said, “I don’t know anybody to this day who thinks they are entitled to march into the president’s office and just go right in without permission or anything else, right in the middle of a meeting or whatever, but he would just go right in. He would come in and say, ‘Damn it, Kingman, you can’t let this happen!’”

Confrontation was Coffin’s style. Chauncey remembered that Coffin once walked into a fraternity house unannounced during the group’s officer elections to interrogate the students about why they weren’t electing black leaders. He leveraged his oratory to rail against the old-boy-network attitude that still pervaded campus.

“In a world in which traditions need to be reshaped and purged as much as protected to support what we already hold, O God, bless us all with uncertainty,” Coffin said at a luncheon in celebration of Brewster’s inauguration as University president. As Yale shifted from an elite white Protestant school to a more progressive, diverse and pluralistic place, Coffin was an unapologetic advocate for reform.

The cultural context of Coffin’s time at Yale makes his faith-based activism even more striking. The 1970s were a time of decreasing religious engagement on college campuses. Amid an anti-authority cultural revolution, religion had fallen by the wayside. The deep and seemingly inalterable connection between tradition and religion would create a tension that generations of progressives before and after Coffin struggled to reconcile.

Yet Coffin was an uncompromising revolutionary. Drawing on the Protestant Reformation as a parallel to the civil rights movement, he liked to quote Martin Luther: “My conscience is captive to the word of God. … To go against conscience is neither right nor safe. Here I stand. I can do no other,” Coffin repeated. “God help me.”

(Courtesy of Arnold Gold/Heart Connecticut Media)

Revolutionizing, again

Professor Jennifer Klein was standing near Jason Ramos, the Ramoses’ eldest son, the morning of her arrest. As a historian of social movements, she noticed what others might have missed: The rally did not focus solely on Christian prayer, even though, 15 years ago, a similar protest would have. “The language has become more ecumenical,” she said.

For Klein, Trump’s incendiary rhetoric on immigration echoed anti-Semitic chants by neo-Nazis at her alma mater, the University of Virginia. A threat to Latino Americans is a threat to every historically marginalized group, she said. Collective action — the concept that links her most closely to the other religious leaders involved in the protest — is a moral imperative of Judaism for Klein. “Tikkun olam,” the religious duty to work collectively to “repair the world,” underpins her beliefs.

Nine months earlier, repair work on campus was focused on those in the Yale community affected by Trump’s travel ban. The ban targeted seven predominantly Muslim countries. Abrar Omeish ’17, former president of the Muslim Students Association, helped coordinate the January rally in support of affected Yalies.

“The purpose was showing unity,” Omeish said of the Jan. 29 rally, which was led by a group of organizers that included members of the Women’s Center, the Slifka Center for Jewish Life and the Yale Democrats. “It needed all of the student groups involved to fulfill that purpose.”

The student organizers projected the word “solidarity” onto the stone facade of Sterling Memorial Library. About 1,000 people attended, holding candles and standing in silence until a series of speeches spurred the crowd into chants. For Omeish, the power of the rally rested in a “faith-based model of activism.”

Selflessness and humility before God guided the organization of the rally. “It was successful because of the blessing of God,” she said. Only by approaching the rally with a focus on the issues, rather than grandstanding or self-promotion, could the event fulfill its purpose: “bridge-building across these communities who feel marginalized and alienated.”

The night of the rally, Associate Chaplain Maytal Saltiel was busy “schlepping,” as she affectionately called it. Saltiel is practiced in the logistics of event organizing; she held the official title of “repair the world coordinator” while working at the University of Pennsylvania Hillel. Last January, she was one of the few people who could find power outlets and a sound system for the rally. “We are the behind-the-scenes people,” Saltiel joked.

(Robbie Short)

The Chaplain’s Office has weathered its own turbulent political moments over recent years. In October 2015, University Chaplain Sharon Kugler found herself at the center of a national controversy. Kugler, acting as a member of the Intercultural Affairs Council, co-signed an email to the Yale student body about cultural appropriation in Halloween costumes, asking students to “avoid those circumstances that threaten our sense of community or disrespects, alienates or ridicules segments of our population based on race, nationality, religious belief or gender expression.”

The directors of the Afro-American Cultural Center, Native American Cultural Center, La Casa Cultural, Asian American Cultural Center and Slifka Center co-signed the letter. Within a week, Associate Master of Silliman College Erika Christakis sent out a response challenging the basis for labeling costumes appropriative and affirming “freedom of speech.” As protests escalated, reporters from national news outlets descended on campus.

“That semester set us on a course of trying to figure out how to listen to each other better,” Kugler reflected. She said she did not regret sending out the email. But she emphasized the importance of dialogue amid political controversy, perhaps directing her comment at the alienation and pain many on campus felt during the semester-long period of protests. “It’s an office that attempts very delicately to keep people talking and to feel accessible to everyone. The prophetic voice that is found in accompaniment and radical hospitality and a kind of endurance.”

(Robbie Short)

Kugler and Saltiel, in some ways, are the new, pluralistic continuation of Coffin’s legacy. The chaplaincy, when it was first created in 1927, was intended for one person, the campus pastor. When Coffin was appointed in 1958, the Chaplain’s Office had hardly changed — his voice was the prophetic one. Over time, the staff expanded, adding a Jewish associate chaplain in the ’80s as well as Muslim and Hindu staff members in the mid-2000s.

Today’s chaplaincy comprises Catholic, Protestant and Jewish chaplains as well as Muslim and Hindu directors of student life. With this new pluralism, its voice is diffused among many chaplains.

As outspoken as Coffin was, the chaplaincy today takes a much more subtle tone on social justice. “It’s no longer the case that the chaplain assumes the role of standing at the pulpit and having the prophetic voice be that one voice,” Kugler said. “I think if Coffin were alive today, he would probably be among us.”

Liberal Divinity

Coffin spent three years on the Sterling Divinity Quadrangle, where his legacy persists in the Divinity School’s activist student body. Much like the College, the Divinity School has a slew of liberal-minded student organizations: the LGBTQ group DivOut; FERNS, an environmentally focused group; and Peace, Action and Justice, a race-focused social action group. The organizations tackle social issues both in preparation for ministry and advocacy work at large.

Attending the Divinity School is often just as much about social history as it is about theology. Qadry Harris DIV ’18, a member of the Yale Black Seminary, grew up going to a black Baptist church in the Bronx. His studies center on radical scholarship in religious academia.

“Black religion in the Americas begins with antebellum chattel slavery,” Harris explained. “It’s not a secret that white slave masters were using Christianity to justify slavery.”

(Robbie Short)

Harris sees a racial divide in American religion. On one side stands the slave master’s religion of oppression and, on the other, the religion of liberation and resistance developed by slaves to subvert slave-master Christianity. Harris explains today’s Christianity in terms of its past: Enslaved people “started appropriating Christian symbols to say, ‘God wants me to be free.’” Social justice, for Harris, is the inevitable consequence of faith in something larger.

“The Black Lives Matter movement — these protestors and activists are responding to the Trayvon Martins of the world,” Harris said. “There are those that would assert that Black Lives Matter has absolutely nothing to do with the Christian gospel and the church. I’m of the opposite opinion. It is a manifestation of the church because it is people of the church fighting to protect our personhood.”

When asked how he reconciles his Christianity with the religion of oppression from which he believes it is descended, he said, “I don’t know if reconciliation is the right way to put it.” Harris acknowledged that his faith is not unimpeachable and that even the black Baptist tradition has internalized elements of dominance and suppression, though those influences are difficult to identify. His black liberation politics bears the marks of a religion that was once an instrument of oppression, and that does not sit easily with him.

The culture of the Divinity School lends itself to radical action. In fall 2017, Divinity School Dean Greg Sterling introduced “Religion and Ecology” and “Latinx and Latin American Christianity” as new concentrations of study. Earlier this year, the school also announced plans to construct the “regenerative village,” a highly energy-efficient residential complex designed to dramatically reduce waste.

(Courtesy of Sam Chauncey, Jr.)

Julia Johnson DIV ’18 and Emily Bruce DIV ’19 run Faith, Environmentalism, Religion, Nature and Spirituality, or FERNS, the religious ecology student group at the Divinity School. Johnson, a nondenominational Protestant, and Bruce, a Unitarian Universalist, both regularly attend programming at the Yale School of Forestry. One event last spring, a film festival, convinced Johnson to discard her trash bin and practice a zero-waste lifestyle.

“A lot of my energy goes to thinking about how the church doesn’t talk about climate change,” Bruce said. Johnson also expressed frustration that, even at Yale, faith leaders do not recognize the religious importance of environmental stewardship. Climate change is something “that’s very Christian and very political.”

Despite Johnson’s frustration with religious leadership on environmentalism at her school, divinity schools at elite secular universities like Yale and Harvard are much more liberal than their counterparts at other institutions. According to several Yale Divinity School students, Yale’s liberalism derives from the University’s broader secular liberal tradition; the College and the graduate and professional schools have attracted a liberal student body since the ’60s. Saltiel, the associate chaplain, attended Harvard Divinity School and said that Yale and Harvard are two of the most pluralistic of their kind.

Not every religious school focuses on social history the way that Yale Divinity School does. At most Southern and Midwestern theological schools, the political outlook is different. In a 1995 Atlantic article exploring Regent University in Virginia, Harvard Divinity School professor Harvey Cox characterized the mission of the school: to produce an “elite of religiously trained professionals to exert a spiritual influence on the secular realm.” He described a series of op-eds in the campus newspaper debating the extent to which Christians have a right to dominion over society. Cox argued that the school was a microcosm of debate within conservative Christian communities at large.

Mike Lally DIV ’18 attended St. Louis University, a Jesuit Catholic school whose curriculum is centered on theology. Lally seemed bemused by the Yale Divinity School’s liberalism. The Divinity School, he said, is “basically a liberal secular institution with some Christian language tossed on top.”

A Place in the Tradition

On a rainy Sunday in October, Lally stood near the steps of the altar at St. Thomas More, offering communion with two other parishioners and Beloin. Two lines of congregants proceeded toward them. Earlier during the service, Beloin preached about change in the Church over time. It was the Sunday before the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation, and Beloin joked that, if Martin Luther were alive today, he would find a place in today’s more grounded Catholic faith.

He delivered a homily about neighborly love and the importance of putting aside differences to find consensus. He cited the case of the Ramos family. It is hard to take action from a place of comfort and privilege, he said, but love of God is parallel to love of neighbor, so we must act. Quoting from the daily liturgy, he added, “You shall not wrong any alien, for you were once aliens yourselves in the land of Egypt.’”

The quotation harkens back to the prophet Moses, who claimed the divine authority to free the Israelites, restructure society and make political demands to the pharaoh. Similarly, Jesus was crucified in part for being a political threat, and Muhammad was nearly assassinated by the Meccans for upending the existing social order. Revolutionary change is a fundamental element of every prophet’s story.

The theologies founded around these figures have taken on a life of their own. Religions created millennia ago have continued to shape the many societies within which they thrive, impacting the daily experience of each individual.

Struggling with the inertia of their religious traditions was one of the things that prompted Saltiel and Kugler to take positions working at a university, where they would interact and collaborate with campus activist culture. Saltiel reflected that her understanding of patriarchy in religion once prompted her to question the role of feminism within faith. Women struggle against religious institutions that are just as patriarchal as the broader societies that they inhabit, she said. There has always been a kind of friction between religious tradition and the social change these activists fight for.

But this kind of wrestling is a motivating factor as often as it is an alienating one. The stakes of social change are higher when considered in an explicitly religious context. Though it is often impossible to tell where religious doctrine ends and cultural custom begins, religious activism is just as much about grappling with religious issues as it is social ones. Especially as Yale’s liberal religious activists navigate a campus that is increasingly secular — more than half of Yale’s students are religiously unaffiliated — contemplating the role of their faith gives language and power to their activism.

Coffin was notable for his backstory. He was the third generation of his family to attend Yale and the heir to a family fortune. “His wealth always hung over him,” Chauncey said. He spent his life at elite institutions: Phillips Academy Andover, Yale College, the CIA, Williams College, Yale Divinity School and the Yale chaplaincy. Yet he worked tirelessly to change the institutions that produced him.

Over the past six decades, aspects of Coffin’s vision have come to pass: Yale has become more pluralistic, and Christianity at large has adapted to socially progressive trends. Over the course of his life, Beloin has seen a version of this change in the Catholic faith: “I look for times when the Church gets it right, I am inspired by that,” he said. “And when I think the Church gets it wrong, I try to learn from that.”

For Beloin, morality is too connected to social issues for him to stay aloof. His views demand that, while he stands above the congregation at his pulpit on Sunday, he also sits down in front of the doors of the Hartford courthouse and stoops to pick up trash during his court-ordered 24 hours of community service.

He remembered, “When I was walking down to the corner to be fingerprinted, one of the cops walking with me turned to me and said, ‘Hey Father, it wasn’t worth it, was it?’ I looked at him and I said, ‘Well as a matter of fact, it was.’”

At the Hartford jail, police put the protesters into two-person cells. Each cell had a bunk bed and an exposed toilet. Its walls were brick. Everything in the cell was nailed down, and Davis remembered empathizing with those threatened by deportation. In his loss of freedom, he experienced “just a fraction of what they experience.” His only lifeline was the lawyer’s phone number written in permanent marker on his forearm.

Beloin was placed with Pentecostal Elder Ron Hurt, who preaches at Deliverance Temple Church in New Haven’s Hill neighborhood. The church sometimes takes in people with addictions, helping them on the path to recovery. It owns a house next door where people looking for shelter can stay. Hurt has preached and done advocacy work in the neighborhood for 12 years.

“We talked for quite a while about our different experiences of faith and church and why we were there,” Beloin remembered. They discussed poverty, the voiceless and their congregations. They stretched out on their beds, Hurt in the top bunk and Beloin in the bottom. Privately, Beloin contemplated the Exodus narrative of the widow, the orphan and the alien. They prayed.

UP CLOSE:
A hidden gem moves west

Credits

UP CLOSE:
New Haven's push for police accountability

Up Close:
Tearing down the ivory tower

Incorporating Connecticut:
Urbanizing Business in a Suburban State

DKE's open secret:
Eight more women make accusations against fraternity

No Beef:
A New Haven teen dreamed of dancing and died without reason

Under the Wing

Yale-Harvard 2017:
Scenes from The Game

The Game 2017

COVERAGE

Team 145 wins The Game, outright Ivy title

Scenes from The Game

Team 145 seeks outright championship

Keys to The Game

BY THE NUMBERS: Ivy title race hits final week

A game unlike any other

Dudek looks to cap off stellar first-year campaign

Harvard’s season in review

Yale’s season in review

Yale versus Harvard: Fall 2017

Position breakdown

Bulldogs embrace team culture

SWEEDLER: This one matters

SENIOR COLUMN: Team 145

SENIOR COLUMN: 13 years

YALE: Tomorrow is unique

HARVARD: Once in a decade

God & the Left at Yale

UP CLOSE:A hidden gem moves west

Credits

UP CLOSE:New Haven's push for police accountability

Up Close:Tearing down the ivory tower

Incorporating Connecticut:Urbanizing Business in a Suburban State

DKE's open secret:Eight more women make accusations against fraternity

No Beef:A New Haven teen dreamed of dancing and died without reason

Under the Wing

Yale-Harvard 2017:Scenes from The Game

The Game 2017

COVERAGE

God & the Left at Yale

UP CLOSE:
A hidden gem moves west

UP CLOSE:
New Haven's push for police accountability

Up Close:
Tearing down the ivory tower

Incorporating Connecticut:
Urbanizing Business in a Suburban State

DKE's open secret:
Eight more women make accusations against fraternity

No Beef:
A New Haven teen dreamed of dancing and died without reason

Yale-Harvard 2017:
Scenes from The Game